Harvard’s system of general education should emphasize methodology over topic because methods are harder to teach and learn than facts.
That is Ed Glaeser, on the Harvard curriculum, more here. Thanks to Yan Li for the pointer.
The best sentence I read today (so far)
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That seems like a rationalization to me. Economists want students to learn Economics.
Isn’t that another way of saying “teach them how to think, not what to think?”
Amen to Joan’s last sentence. I agree that being able to think is far more important than having mastery over facts per se. Its just that, while I’ve met plenty of people who have knowledge of a lot of facts but who can’t think in a structured and original way, I’ve met just about zero people who could think in a structured and original way who didn’t also have knowledge of a lot of facts.
Or put another way, the “methods” that are hard to learn and worth learning are generally best studied by learning how they are applied to solving difficult problems. But you can;t follow a line of reasoning if you don’t understand what is being reasoned through.
Though facts are inevitably part of the thinking process, there’s a matter of emphasis. One of my college professors started his chem classes by discussing phlogiston. He ended up spending a large chunk of the professor getting his students to come up with their own tests for the phlogiston theory. I wasn’t in that class, so I’m afraid that I don’t know how it ended up, but I thought it was an ingenious example of emphasizing methodology over material.
Now of course, this does not imply (or cannot imply) that you aren’t teaching material, but to imply that I can’t think scientifically without knowing scientific terms and theories before you start is simply not the case (as elementary school science fair projects demonstrate every year).
Surely there are ways to demonstrate methods of observation, reasoning (deducing), and testing without trodging step by step through the newest textbook.
Also, I must add that thinking like a _____ does not makes you a _____. For a kid to think logically does not make him Sherlock Holmes, but it does accomplish the primary goal: education.
people who learned based on facts — back in the day — generally seemed to end up alot smarter than the current crop, where facts are deemphasized. seems possible that, without a grasp of facts as a framework, you can’t really teach method and, in fact, it may be better for an understanding of method to arise from learning facts rather than assuming you can teach method.
//To think like Sherlock Holmes you have to know a lot of facts.//
I think the author agrees that even topic-based courses do teach
methods, but “via intensive exploration of a single, sometimes
narrow topic” for which I presume a lot of factual knowledge will be
required. A more general application of method, in a wide range of settings
that the author proposes however, could be based on what the students
already know and might not need new factual learning.
As nick said, it would be interesting to learn how methodology is
taught at lower levels as they are likely to be working with basic facts
and what could be common knowledge for undergrads. Any pointers?
I wonder how many of these comments are written by someone who read the article. I don’t think Ed is proposing some abstract “methods” course for all students. He is saying that each student should be required to take a methods course in some discipline. The “facts” part of the course would depend on the discipline- different in economics than in history, for example, or psychology or physics. Surely not every discipline could do such a empirical methods course, but many could.
I believe that to think on a methodological level you must learn the facts. It is not possible to think on a higher level without knowing the basics first. There for I believe it is more import to teach the basic facts and by doing that students can use those facts to think methodology.
“With that, he seems to imply that the biological sciences somehow make less use of the ‘scientific method’ than the physical sciences do.”
I dunno about that. In my reading he is lumping biology, ecology, etc. in with physics as “physical sciences,” as distinguished from “social sciences.”
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