SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Weird Science, financial literacy and other “Stuff”

Since this last recession, the concept of teaching financial literacy has been written about quite a bit.  Maclean’s magazine editor Peter Shawn Taylor has an interesting essay in yesterday’s Financial Post section of the National Post.  Taylor’s thesis: “Before anyone unveils any new courses in basic financial literacy, we should make it a crusade to rid our schools of the financially illiterate and factually incorrect course material currently masquerading as economics and science in our schools today.”

School for Thought agrees.

In Trashing the Children Taylor talks talks about a new cartoon documentary, The Story of Stuff, that is making its way into elementary school science classes.   What concerns him is that the cartoon-ementary is a “clever delivery system for a non-stop stream of outrageous leg-pullers and eyebrow-raisers. References are deceptive, misinterpreted or plain wrong. And the message is explicitly intended to make the kids watching feel ashamed of their lives and interests.”

Looks like An Inconvenient Truth all over again.  Lots of lies and no counter-argument.  Get kids made feel guilty while we brainwash them about the environment, business, and global economy.

SQE’s 2005 examination of cross-Canada K-12 science curricula, Teaching Science in the 21st Century, noted the increasing number of dogmatic statements unsubstantiated by scientific evidence creeping in to provincial curricula.  Teaching Science concluded that encouraging a skeptical, questioning attitude and teaching how to distinguish “junk” science from the real thing is essential.   If the ultimate goal of education is to provide knowledge and inculcate a questioning mind, how is allowing “stuff” like this going to achieve that? 

Good science says that hypotheses not supported by facts should be abandoned. Time to trash this one.