A Montana state Legislature bill floated this week would forbid science teachers in public schools from teaching anything other than “facts.” The bill is doomed to fail for multiple reasons: like North Dakota’s recent attempt to define “gender,” the bill is unenforceable, and has no visible support besides its sponsor. Further, the bill’s language apparently provides no meaningful definition of “facts,” something philosophers of science have debated for generations.
The bill itself is beneath contempt and wouldn’t deserve commentary on its own. But situated in context, alongside the North Dakota gender bill and Florida’s ongoing efforts to purge entire disciplines of “ambiguity,” a pattern becomes visible. One political party wants to engineer an educational system completely devoid of debate, complexity, or doubt. All subjects become lists of facts, answers are either right or wrong, and entire disciplines become foregone conclusions.
Smarter commentators have spilled copious ink over the current right-wing push to ban books and censor classroom discussions. Yet as new fronts in the battle become visible, a pattern emerges. These accusations aren’t directed at any individual fact or discipline, despite the attention paid to science or African American studies. Rather, taken together, they show a desire to produce a generation too uninformed to formulate questions or demonstrate rudimentary curiosity.
This desire makes itself most visible in studying topics where clearly right answers exist. The mass removal of books from Florida classrooms has reportedly swept up anything dealing, even tangentially, with sexuality, religion, and race; baseball icons Roberto Clemente and Jackie Robinson are too controversial for Florida today. But as I’ve noted elsewhere, absolute facts are seldom interesting. Only the controversial dynamics of controversy make facts worthwhile.
Science, including both the physical and social sciences, reveal the importance of controversy. If I drop a baseball, it will fall. This claim isn’t controversial. But why does it fall? Not until Isaac Newton did anybody formulate an answer that withstood scrutiny, without relying on God or a circular claim of “Because it does, duh.” Newton’s theory of gravitation created models which other scientists could replicate, and therefore could verify or disprove. That’s what a theory is.
When legislators reduce science to memorizable facts, they strip science of meaning. We don’t care about science as a description of obviously true events; we care about science because it permits informed and testable predictions. When Newton’s theories accurately forecast the location of the planet Neptune, his theory was considered credible. When his theories inaccurately described the orbit of Mercury, Albert Einstein formulated a new theory.
Anybody who remembers the tedium of grade-school arithmetic “skillz drillz” can easily imagine how stultifying an education based around only facts would be. Especially when those facts come pre-filtered to protect White parents’ tender sensibilities. Without enough knowledge of controversy to test opposing sides, and without enough awareness at times to even realize a controversy exists, students are reduced to memorizing lists, a task kids famously hate.
In other words, an entirely fact-based education seems designed to make kids mentally check out early. Without questions to solve, without patterns to identify, without friction to resolve, students predictably become bored and stop caring. Anything that students can correctly identify on a Scantron sheet, still the hallmark of standardized tests, probably is also boring. As this pervasive boredom slowly overtakes academia, one wonders if this isn’t deliberate.
Although the Montana bill makes science central here, the same principles apply to all topics. Paul Lockhart writes that many freshers enter college thinking they’re good at mathematics, when they’re actually good at following directions. (Replace “good at” with “bad at” where appropriate.) Ron DeSantis’ attempts to whitewash history only make explicit what James Loewen claims has always been implicit in schoolbook history.
Taken together, the pattern emerges: students don’t learn to ask questions. They learn topics only shallowly, reduce all subjects to memorized lists, and mostly forget everything after the standardized test. The system creates deeply incurious graduates who comply with authority simply to make the moment go away. Students emerge perfectly suited for essentially robotic industrial jobs that, ironically, don’t much exist in America anymore.
As a sometime teacher myself, I don’t like these conclusions, but I can’t avoid them either. I remember spending months trying to reignite students’ innate childhood curiosity, but by the time they reached me, the system had already squelched it. Bills and laws like these serve neither teachers nor students. But they do serve to create a permanent underclass of supposedly schooled graduates forever dependent on arbitrary authority.
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