The Dumbing Down Effect of American Public Education

VIPSI-2009 BelgradeApril 2-5, 2009

Felix T. HongDept of Physiology

Wayne State UniversityDetroit, Michigan 48201 USA

fhong@med.wayne.edu

American public (K-12) education vs. American college and graduate education

American K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) education continued to decline over the past quarter century, in spite of repeated efforts to reform education.

American college and graduate education was able to maintain high standards for quite some time, but it began to show signs of erosion because of the quality of entering new high-school graduates.

The culprit might be teachers education for the K-12 system, as suggested by the fact that few college and university professors were graduate of teachers colleges; college teachers were spared.

Anton Lawson’s popular book gives a glimpse into the nature of teachers education

Lawson’s book “The Neurological Basis of Learning, Development and Discovery: Implications for Science and Mathematics Instruction (2003)” summarizes the central dogma of teachers education: scientific discoveries are pure consequences of logical deductions (called hypothetico-deductive theory).

His proof: Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s motion, as chronicled in his book “Nuncius Sidereus (1610),” can be cast into the format of a syllogigm: (“if … and … then … but … therefore …”).

If only logical deductions are involved then knowledge is the major determinant of ability to make discoveries or solving novel problems.

Consequently, students were taught too much factual knowledge, and became overwhelmed. They resorted to memorization into order to cope with information explosion.

Contrasting views of Albert Einstein and Henri Poincaré

Yet Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Henri Poincaré said, “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.”

In my previous VIPSI presentation, I have established that intuition comes from visual thinking (picture-based reasoning), whereas logic is essentially algorithmic (i.e., syllogism; verbal thinking or rule-based reasoning).

Einstein also pointed out that he invoked visual thinking in making discoveries, while verbal logic came after considerable struggles.

Nikola Tesla was also a practitioner of visual thinking.

Galileo’s discovery proved Lawson wrong, instead

While Lawson invoked Galileo’s discovery to support his theory, we shall invoke the same to prove his theory wrong.

Galileo’s narration provided the logical proof. Lawson’s arguments are therefore little more than tautology.

Galileo’s did not explicitly describe how he had thought to make discoveries; it was a common occurrence that discoverers had no conscious awareness of their own visual thinking (Carl Friedrich Gauss was a notable example).

Galileo’s evidence, as interpreted by Lawson, was too weak to be convincing about Galileo’s moon hypothesis.

It is possible to reconstruct Galileo’s visual thinking on the basis of his logical narration.

What Lawson missed or ignored Galileo mentioned, for a total of 14 times during his 2 month

(January 7 through March 2, 1610) observations, that the four “little stars” (putative satellites) form a straight line, which is parallel to the ecliptic.

Interpretation by means of visual thinking: The orbits of Jupiter’s four moons are in the same plane as the Earth’s orbit. Terrestrial observations see their orbits in an edge-on direction, and see the four little stars move on a straight line with a simple harmonic motion. The straight line should be parallel to the ecliptic (the sun’s trajectory), which is essentially the extension of the earth’s orbit to the celestial hemisphere.

Plotting Galileo’s data

The trajectory of two larger satellites (Callisto and Ganymede) exhibits simple harmonic motion, as projected onto the celestial hemisphere, yielding orbiting periods of 16 days, and 7 days, respectively.

Modern (official) values are 16.7 days and 7.15 days. The resolution of the trajectories of the two remaining satellites is not

sufficient to determine the periods.

Evidence from expected planetary motion: direct vs. retrograde motion

Outer planets, such as Jupiter, undergo a “looping” motion: it changes from normal eastward (direct) motion to westward (retrograde) motion, and vice versa, every 4 or 5 months. By presuming the little stars as fixed stars, Jupiter reversed its motion much too many times within a 2 month period. This strongly suggests that the little stars are not fixed stars but satellites of Jupiter.

Anton Lawson completely ignored this evidence. However, I reached the conclusion by observing two consecutive

reversals. But Galileo was able to reach the same conclusion two days earlier after observing merely a single reversal of Jupiter’s presumed apparent motion.

How did Galileo manage to do it? He did it by means of a better [than average] skill in visual thinking.

Stay tuned for the fascinating detailed evidence to be presented.

Concluding Remarks Lawson’s interpretation of Galileo’s data was erroneous

with a single exception that involved a one-step logical deduction.

Apparently, multi-step logical deductions are difficult because of the combinatorial variability of getting the syllogism in the right order.

I suggest that multi-step logical deductions, as demonstrated by Sherlock Holmes, are an after-thought subsequent to picture-based reasoning, and are constructed by “reading off the map”, i.e., translating pictures into words, as done by Einstein with great struggles.

Lawson’s theory contributed to the predicaments of K-12 students. Teaching visual thinking may alleviate it.

Selected References FT Hong: The enigma of creative problem solving: a biocomputing perspective. In:

Molecular Electronics: Bio-sensors and Bio-computers, (L Barsanti, V Evangelista, P Gualtieri, V Passarelli and S Vestri, Eds.), Kluwer Scientific Publishers, Dordrecht, pp. 457-542, 2003.

FT Hong: A multi-disciplinary survey of biocompuging, Part 2. In: Information Processing and Living Systems (VB Bajic, TW Tan, Eds), Imperial College Press, pp. 141-573, 2005.

FT Hong: The enigma of human creativity: hidden messages from Nikola Tesla’s Moji Pronalasci. In: Naš Tesla (RJ Halaši, IP Ćosić, T.J. Halaši, Eds.), University of Novi Sad Faculty of Technical Science, pp. 127-176, 2006 (in English).

Serbian translation: Enigma ljudskog stvaralastva: Skrivene poruke u knjizi “Moji pronalasci” Nikole Tesle. In: Tesla: Vizije, delo, zivot, (M. Benisek, Dj. Koruga, and S. Pokrajac, Eds.) Masinaski fakultet Beograd, University of Belgrade, pp. 125-167, 2007.