Good Entropy

When a Question of Science Brooks No Dissent – Quillette

How are educated and credentialed people able to get things so wrong? By remaining ignorant about technical matters. And as I see it, trained scientists offer scant help. At yet another campus event intended to alert our students to the threat of climate change, the speaker, an earth-science faculty member, expressed at the outset his irritation at being challenged on occasion with skeptical questions when he had spent decades educating the public on this matter. During the discussion period that followed his talk, I took the speaker to task for making what I saw as a preemptory strike to silence young people in attendance who, perhaps giving climate change serious consideration for the first time, might have wished to press him on his more provisional assertions. As an educator, he should have welcomed challenging questions from them, I maintained, not tried to shut them down. “We hear it said often enough,” I concluded, “but still we forget what our job is: Not to tell the students what to think, but rather to teach them how to think for themselves.”