"Education" across generations

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If a nation were to decide that one generation of children were to be taught that any flying object that they personally can't recognize is a spacecraft from another world, it might be a new idea at first. After the second and third generation, such would become established dogma, would it not? What if such things as spontaneous generation were taught as fact, that flies come from rotting meat, mice from wooden boxes, etc? Would that also become dogma eventually? And who is to question it if it's taught by the official school system anyway? It must be right if it is taught at a government authorized institute of education, mustn't it? Or must it?

You are right on the matter of common sense, however, I don't see the applicability. Most ideas are established by the academy, and the academy does engage in testing for its ideas. So..... even if we have a bizarre idea like: "The earth revolves around the sun", the legitimacy of this idea is granted by the overall body of knowledge siding with it, causing it to be promoted in classrooms.

The US is just one country.

If the school system were decide one day to teach all school children that the Moon is made of green cheese, or that the earth is flat. Then that would be a false dogma.

Theoretically round earthers would become marginalized as hereitics and wackos. and all americans would buy into the earth being flat as the way it is. In theory.

Excpet the US would become a laughing stock, because other countries would not subscribe to teaching that dogma. Further such a dogma would mess up our whole science education system and would hobble the nations ability to compete. American citizens would be aware of how "canadians are taught that the moon is made of rock".

So imposing such a whacky dogma would not actually work for very long.

And why would the educational establishment do something like that anyway?

The last time a major nation did that was the Soviet Union when it imposed Lysenkian biology on its school system in the nineteen fourties- because Lysenko ( an agricultural speciest but not an scientists) had the ear and favor of Stalin. Sort of a psuedo scientific alternative to modern genetics. It was the seventies before the Russia fixed the damage to its education system from that dogma.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 05 Aug 2011, 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The overall body of knowledge does indeed grant legitimacy to an idea or illegitimacy to ones which are more likely false, however I think that it is not the body of knowledge itself which causes an idea to be promoted or railed against in classrooms or lecture halls. Knowledge by itself is nothing. It's data on a disc, that apart from an interpreter (such as a reader for the disc) and a processor (such as a CPU) is not meaningful. Knowledge is filtered through individuals who act to cause their interpretations of knowledge to be taught.

I presume this thread was started to imply that the teaching of evolution is something based on dogma and not on evidence. If so, it is wrong. Would iamnotaparakeet object to students being taught that the earth goes around the sun instead of vice versa? We have so much evidence of so many different types that this is so that it is not considered controversial to teach this as "fact." Why then are some people dismayed when students are taught that humans share common ancestry with other living things? There is at least as much evidence this is so as there is for the heliocentric solar system.

I am continually amazed at some people who seem sane and rational until the subject of human origins comes up. The evidence for evolution, even macroevolution, is about as overwhelmingly one-sided as any subject known to man, yet because of a bunch of religious nuts there is a "controversy." The controversy is NOT a scientific one.

And it ISN'T a matter of filtering or interpreting the evidence according to one's world view. The bottom line is that ALL the evidence supports evolution, and NO evidence supports a literal reading of Genesis. IF you still want to believe in a literal reading of Genesis, that's fine for you, but don't be so deluded as to insist that there is anything to back up that interpretation other than your opinion.