In the video above, shared by Dan Colman this morning on the Open Culture blog, Richard Feynman makes this powerful statement.
It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with [the] experiment, it’s wrong. – Richard Feynman
How would we apply this to education?
We should look at what is working and decide our policies based on the evidence. We should be looking at data, which should have a broad spectrum of types (just like scientific data has) and use it to help determine policy. We need to hold true to Feynmann’s process as well, which is to make a guess as to what will work, decide what the consequences of those actions would be, and then find a way to determine if this is true or not.
There are a number of initiatives in education which either lack data to support their implementation, or which have contradictory evidence as to their effectiveness. For example, various influential people have been promoting the idea of merit pay for teachers, for which the evidence is inconclusive. In other words, someone had an interesting guess about how education works (teachers will work harder for the chance at more money) and drew the conclusion that student learning would improve as a result (as measured by one form of assessment, a standardized test), and the results of the experiment have not shown a result one way or the other (but have shown that when you dangle a big enough carrot in front of people, they will cheat to get it).
My guess is that the schools that work the best start with the premise that teachers should have sufficient autonomy and support to master their craft, and someone (parents, school, or teachers) provides the resources (food, clothing, shelter, safety, supplies, technology) for their children to succeed. I predict that in such schools you would see higher engagement in learning from administrators, teachers, students, parents, and the community.
Who is willing to do an experiment to see if my guess is right?
Bryan Sanctuary says:
Let us suppose that there is a branch of science that is well established. Quantum information theory is one. That field rests on one Theorem: Bell’s. People in this area believe in things they cannot explain. They call it “quantum weirdness” and that basically refers to non-locality: you have two entangled spins, separate the two by a million light years, then if you flip one, the other INSTANTLY flops. How you ask? “Quantum weirdness” say the pundits.
No one can explain this, so those in the field completely ignore Feynman’s comment.
Now let us say some people come along and prove that Bell’s theorom is wrong: then the field of quantum information should either collapses, or makes a major re-adjustment. Three disproofs of Bell exist, yet they refuse to accept them in favour of weirdness.
I think that it is naive to expect science to be as subjective as Feynman would like. In fact throughout history, old ideas have been hard to change: Ernst Mach did not accept the corpuscular nature of fluids, thereby holding up its acceptance for years.
April 10, 2011 — 3:16 pm
David Wees says:
Yes, there are large areas of science where there is controversy and where we need to make improvements in the process. Yes, the analogy is not the complete picture, and the amount of time between each step is not really given, but that doesn’t mean that something like this process wouldn’t be effective in education.
So much of educational "research" is bound by the bias of the researcher, be they liberal or conversative, behaviourist or constructivist. It is difficult to untangle some of the contradictory "evidence" for various different types of educational practices. In many cases, people don’t even look at the evidence, but go with a "well we’ve always done it this way" approach.
April 10, 2011 — 8:50 pm