January 21, 2014
Dr. Edward R. Dougherty
Robert M. Kennedy ’26 Chair
Director, Center for Bioinformatics and Genomic Systems Engineering
Distinguished Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Texas A&M University
Title: The Impoverishment of Scientific Education
Abstract
There are two basic questions concerning scientific education: What is the aim of education? And how does the nature of the subject matter determine the manner in which the aim is to be achieved? This talk takes the position that the aim of education is to bring children out of their world into the adult world so that, as adults, they can carry civilization forward to whatever challenges it will face by bringing to bear the learning of the past. As for achieving this aim, scientific education must prepare the student to think as a scientist, which means thinking within the framework of the scientific epistemology. I will argue that scientific education is impoverished precisely because it fails to provide the necessary educational foundation to turn ordinary thinking undergraduates into scientifically thinking graduates. Specifically, it does not free them from the ordinary physical categories of understanding and provide them with the mathematical and statistical tools with which to conceptualize scientific theories that, by the very nature of science, lie outside the ordinary categories of understanding.