Off TopicAre you a QOTWer? Do you want to start a thread that isn't a direct answer to the current QOTW? Then this place, gentle poster, is your friend.
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rob, Sun 1 Apr 2001, 1:00)
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Sorry for the delay- work is keeping me busy today.I'd like to toss out a few relevant snippets from Pournelle, as he's a lot more eloquent than I am (and I'm kinda swamped at the moment):
I weary of the Intelligent Design in Schools argument, because apparently there is a small number of apparently intelligent and articulate people who simply do not understand what they are saying. No, they say, we don't want central control of curricula in all the public schools through the nation. But the Intelligent Design advocates are so stupid, their arguments so vapid, that we simply cannot afford to allow them to be presented in the hundred or so school districts that would mandate ID to be taught along with Darwinism, lest America lose her soul.
If that sounds like a very unfair summary of what the "keep the ID people out of our schools!" people are saying, I fear it is an accurate one, and after a dozen exchanges of email I find that I cannot get across the real point: that central control of curricula is a cure far worse than the disease; that if anything is a contest for the soul of America it is the central control of what is taught in the public schools.
Let's look at one example of what amounted to central control of curriculum: Freudianism. The psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud were once the "consensus" view of most of the US intellectual establishment. They had heavy duty social implications, and justified really drastic changes in society. Adorno and Frenkel-Brunswick and others produced theories about "the authoritarian personality" and various theories of the proper relationship between children and parents, men and women, citizens and societies.
And the whole theory was and is nonsense. The clinical effectiveness of the very expensive Freudian analysis was no greater than that of far cheaper techniques including not only Carl Rogers and his permissiveness but also L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. Freud postulated all kinds of structures like Ego, and Id, and Super-Ego that not only have no discoverable neurological counterparts but contradict much of what is known about brain structure. His interpretation of dreams ended up with Immanuel Velikovsky writing a book about Freud's dreams. Velikovsky also had a theory of cosmology that had about as much evidence in hard data as Freud's theories of human behavior. One can argue that this is hardly coincidence: Freud didn't teach his disciples to pay attention to data (he knew that people often lied to their therapists as well as to themselves). Freud did not explicitly reject the scientific method, but he may as well have.
Indeed, Hubbard's Dianetics paid at least as much attention to evidence as Freud did. Of course both Freud and Hubbard made up many of their cases: think of the cases as illustrative scenarios because most of them had no basis in fact. Hubbard built Dianetics as a synthesis of Jung's variant of Freud and the General Semantics theories of Alfred Count Korzybski. Incidentally, Korzybski's book Science and Sanity is worth reading to this day, although it should not be taken as holy writ; and Wendell Johnson and Sam Hayakawa, both followers of Korzybski, wrote valuable books as well. Hubbard of course did not encourage the use of scientific method to test his theories of the human psyche, but he did insist that Dianetics was a science: "The modern science of mental health." It was pretty popular too, and Dianetics practitioners could truthfully report that they got better results than Freudian analysis, and far cheaper, with less expensive training for the practitioners. As a practical matter, Dianetics was more useful than Freud.
Of course Freud had the intellectual cachet and the approval of the intelligentsia, who simultaneously insisted that Freud be taught as truth, while Dianetics had to be suppressed. Much of that suppression came about as accusations of practicing medicine without a license, which caused Hubbard to incorporate Dianetics into Scientology, and to proclaim Scientology as a religion and thus protected by the First Amendment.
Freudianism is not so widely taught as it was when I was a youth, but if a teacher wants to present Freudian theories in school, there will be many to defend his right to do so.
Surely my point is obvious?
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The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 18 Jul 2008, 15:09,
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