March 17
I decided to take a look at the Introductory Psych textbook (written by Dr. Zimbardo) before tomorrow’s final. Since the book is ridiculously over-priced, I never bought it and so I go to the bookstore and take a copy off the shelf and read it there. I am sort of glad I never read the book — it’s written for complete idiots.
Chapter 11, Motivation:
Your alarm clock went off… you dragged yourself right out of bed. Why?
A dramatic photo of a mountain climber accompanies the text. Caption: “What different motivational questions might be asked of this individual’s behavior?”
I am reminded of Richard Feynman’s experience reviewing textbooks for the state education board:
[T]here was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a windup toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture it said, “What makes it go?”
I thought, “I know what it is: They’re going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.” …
I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, “Energy makes it go.” And for the boy on the bicycle, “Energy makes it go.” For everything, “Energy makes it go.”
Now that doesn’t mean anything. Suppose it’s “Wakalixes.” That’s the general principle: “Wakalixes makes it go.” There’s no knowledge coming in. The child doesn’t learn anything; it’s just a word! …
But that’s the way all the books were: They said things that were useless, mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How anybody can learn science from these books, I don’t know, because it’s not science.†
Feynman, of course, was no slouch — he wrote his own physics textbook. the contrast with Zimbardo’s is striking. It has no bright colors and no silly photos (except for one in the preface of the author playing the bongos). The text is clear but demanding.
Chapter 11, Vectors:
In this chapter we introduce a subject known technically in physics as symmetry in physical law. The word “symmetry” is used here with a special meaning and therefore needs to be defined. When is a thing symmetrical — how can we define it?
Feynman’s examples are not at all insulting:
Suppose we build a complex machine in a certain place, with a lot of complicated interactions, and balls bouncing around with forces between them, and so on.
The equations begin a couple paragraphs later. It’s hard to get a real sense of the books from the quotes provided, but I will say that I’m sucked in to Feynman’s, totally tempted to keep reading, whereas Zimbardo’s book bored me so much that I started writing this.
What causes the difference? I think it’s because Zimbardo’s book is at some fundamental level insulting. It says “this topic is so boring and you’re so stupid that we have to give you some stupid example about alarm clocks and mountain climbers”.
The effect is even clearer in person: A teacher starts telling a bunch of kids about wakalixes, the kids don’t care and ignore the teacher, the teacher makes a desperate attempt to grab their attention by lying to them and saying wakalixes power their videogames or something. (I mean, it’s true that videogames run on wakalixes, but not in the way the kids are led to believe.) Now the teacher either has to keep lying about wakalixes, which isn’t educational, or else tell the truth, causing the kids get angry (because they were lied to) and even more bored. It just never works.
With small kids, at least you can claim to justify it by claiming you were just trying to do your best to get the kids’ attention. But you can’t really do that with college students. I mean, these are supposed to be smart kids and they chose to take this class. If they’re not actually interested in the subject, they can drop it. There’s no reason to lie to them.
Psychology is intrinsically fascinating. Everyone wants to know what makes people tick. The fact that you have to resort to these childish tactics means something is terribly wrong. Let’s see what.
Continuing in the Psych textbook, skipping past several pages of alarm-clock-style examples (including an absolutely absurd paragraph about what motivates Lance Armstrong), we get to theories. There’s just one problem: they’re wrong.
I have never understood why psychology is so eager to teach discredited theories. True, others’ missteps can sometimes be educational, but the mistakes Freud, Skinner, and Hull (the man behind the bogus theory of “homeostasis” described in this chapter) aren’t educational, they’re just wrong — and for obvious societal reasons. Yet they continue to be taught, perhaps on the belief that it’s better to teach a wrong theory than no theory at all?
The evidence-free theories continue on throughout the chapter. Usually they’re not endorsed explicitly, but they’re rarely explicitly refuted either. (The closest it comes is when it cites an experiment showing the theory is wrong in some respect, while no theories are cited to show the theory is right in some respect.) Simply including them in the book, then, acts as a tacit endorsement. And since evidence for the theories is rarely given, they’re basically impossible for the student to question or refute.
When textbooks are divorced from fact like this, they become mere repositories of social prejudice. Barbara Ehrenreich has documented how Cold War sociology textbooks were a haven for negative stereotypes of the lower classes:
The lower class, … everyone from drifters and marginally employed slum dwellers to blue collar union members, was characterized by a lack of discipline and perspective. At worst, the lower-class person “Sedulously avoids work, responsibility, and the consequences of tomorrow.” …
[Working class people are] so “inarticulate” they were not even worth listening to. To engage the working-class person in conversation was to risk being seriously bored, since he was “comparatively insensitive to differences in perspective between himself and the listener, and often fails to realize his story is neither understandable nor interesting to the other person.”†
So perhaps it is textbooks for subjects with few facts that succumb to this disease. If this theory is true, then the physics textbooks should be immune. I decided to see what physics textbook Stanford used — I imagined myself asking the author “Do you really think you’re better than Richard Feynman? No? Then why did you write a physics textbook?” — but I see that they use Feynman. [Wonderful! I guess I better take physics at some point.]
posted March 26, 2005 07:37 PM (Education) (6 comments) #