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Quote of the Day: Maria Mitchell on the Great Danger of Student Life
“There is this great danger in student life. Now, we rest all upon what Socrates said, or what Copernicus taught; how can we dispute authority which has come down to us, all established, for ages? We must at least question it; we cannot accept anything as granted, beyond the first mathematical formulae. Question everything else.” — Maria Mitchell
Maria (pronounced in the proper English way after the Great Vowel Shift with a long-I sound, not the foreign European way we generally do now) Mitchell was an astronomer and astronomy professor in the middle to late Nineteenth Century. Back in her day, the students were at least learning Socrates and Copernicus and Aristotle. (How many teeth do women have, Aristotle? Have you tried asking a few to open their mouths to let you count?) Now, the students learn nonsense and pay coming and going for the pleasure, but how many of their professors would suggest they question what they are being taught?
August First is the anniversary of Maria Mitchell’s birth. Happy Birthday Miss Mitchell.
Published in Group Writing
Cool.
But I’m down with questioning questioning at some point and just accepting some things. Yay Thomas Reid!
The schools can’t be fixed, they have to be replaced which is easy. Just turn them over to teachers and make the schools compete for students which parents select as the money goes to them rather than bureaucrats or schools. Good teachers and parents know who the lousy teachers are and they will have to get rid of them. Free competitive markets work and if we don’t enforce that on our socialist top down schools we’ll continue to lose the whole thing and we don’t have much time.
They can’t question what they are being taught now, because now they are being taught by the bestest minds ever!
I thought it was dueling scars…
Only in Prussia.
There are a lot of troubles in modern American education, and I am sure leftist teachers, professors and teachers unions deserve much of the blame. However, we don’t tend to discuss the responsibility on the part of students to really engage with information. In order to question the wisdom of classical thought, you must first read it. In speaking to current high school students, I hear frequent complains about the failings of teachers to teach. Those same students admit to not reading the book!
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Minor details. 😆
As in Mariah Carey? We can pronounce it that way, you have to spell it correctly.
Students blowing off the reading assignments has been going on since Plato handed out his first syllabus. Kids today have never heard of Plato. Chewing over old ideas is one of the best ways of learning how to judge new ones. Instead, they get fed CRT, and climate change, and details on the private lives of their teachers.
That was the English pronunciation of Maria from a bit before Shakespeare’s time. We’ve been influenced by Eye-talians and Puerto Ricans and such, and now generally pronounce it with a long-E rather than the long-I, but the I is proper for English.
Note the spelling:
I think that the idea in the OP is close to 100% wrong.
Do you really want to teach young people to question everything? They are not smart enough to figure it out for themselves. Just about no one is.
On issues of science, students need to be taught the generally accepted models, like the periodic table in chemistry or the laws of motion in physics. Do you want to undermine that?
On issues of morality, students need to be taught in accordance with our history and traditions. In this area, I believe that it is impossible for anyone to create a moral code based on pure reason. The effect of teaching students to question everything, which I think became widespread in the 1960s, was the breakdown of a good system of traditional values, and its replacement with a combination of anarchy and depravity.
I do think that the OP reflects the fundamental divide within what we now call the “conservative” movement, between traditional conservatives and liberal/libertarian types.
Thanks for the history lesson. I didn’t know that.
How would you pronounce Airam? Sadly it took a long time for me to catch on to what that was.
I think it depends on whether you are questioning to understand or questioning to undermine. Critical theory generally is teaching the latter.
She was an astronomy professor. She was teaching a fundamental lesson about science. And that is, no science is right, it’s simply the best theory of how it works we have at the moment. Copernicus was a shift. Einstein was a shift. We are constantly refining things as we learn more, measure more, and come up with new and better ideas. The whole problem with the climate change nonsense is that “the science is settled” and “there is a scientific consensus.” Being permanently settled or having a consensus doesn’t mean right any more than having a consensus of bishops gathered together infused with the Holy Spirit so that they are slugging out different ideas and breaking noses makes their conclusions right about Christianity. And certainly if it’s settled or voted on, it isn’t science. That’s politics instead. That’s what we teach now instead of science. I’ll take the science, thank you.
Backwards and in the Spanish fashion.
Very true.
Exactly. There is nothing per se wrong with questioning. It is questioning in order to arrive at a predetermined outcome that is the problem.
This is why it’s important to have laboratory work in science classes. Does the theory being taught describe actual behavior in the real world? Can it predict such behavior? Are there phenomena that aren’t described, or predicted, by current theory? The generally accepted models are useful instruments for understanding physical reality, but they aren’t themselves that reality. The students ought to be at least exposed to the idea that theories can change, and that new theories can be proposed to perhaps better describe what is observed and measured.
Can anyone remember when the idea of continents plowing through oceanic crust was thought of as being completely ridiculous?
Sure. Or remember when the Hapgood model was out there?
A few years ago I did look up when Pangaea was first used. My daughter was watching a cartoon set in what I guessed to be the 1880s. It was set in the West and the main family was bringing the railroad out there. In one episode, the teacher of the one-room schoolhouse was teaching them about Pangaea. I wondered if it was around by then. No, the word was coined in the 1920s.
Yep. Science changes.
I agree with you: “no.”
A society needs many many times as many people who “don’t question everything” as those who do.
Note: I use the term “question everything” loosely, not literally, to describe the two main categories of people each of whose reading/listening, problem-solving, and writing/talking methods are pragmatically well-suited to one of the two main kinds of pragmatical problems.
Their respective mental capacities are analogous to the muscle ability of a sprinter and a distance runner: more quick, weak, extensive muscles and fewer slow, strong, short-contracting ones, or v. versa.
Society as a whole, or a political party, or a combat battalion–any unit involved in conflict with other units to choose which humans win and which lose–needs many sprinters and few marathoners.
One problem in a republic is, “how do you limit the damage done by the process of recruiting, developing, and retaining the government leaders by the sprinters?”
There is no solution that doesn’t rely on the people as a whole being guided by the Spirit. Giving the vote to the mob, rule by the strongest bully, aristocracy, and absolute monarchy all fail (in different ways) if the people have turned away from G_d.
I thought I invented the idea back in third grade.
About the right time period. 😜
As a kid, I noticed that South America, Africa, India all indicated that the real theory was Continental Drip. Just look at the globe and see that they are all dripping southward.
That sounds like some British heavy metal band planning a reunion tour.
Exactly. We want unquestioning obedience!
Slap this mask on your face! Get your sixth booster! Turn in your guns! Stop eating meat! Of course this isn’t a recession! Inflation is good! Get a chip implanted in your hand! Who really knows what a woman is anyway? Make sure you complete your ESG profile, by the way.