Reason-Giving Versus Truth-Seeking: Reconceptualizing Indoctrination in Education
INTRODUCTION In the literature on indoctrination in education, indoctrination is often defined as having occurred when someone holds certain beliefs either non-evidentially or non-rationally. The emphasis in attempts to avoid indoctrination, then, is to teach students to provide reasons for their beliefs, rather than basing their views simply on unquestioned assumptions, or emotional commitments to certain beliefs. I find this notion problematic. To avoid indoctrination, we must not develop reason-givers; rather, I argue that we must develop what I shall call “truth-seekers.”
Is science a universal or a culture-specific endeavor? The benefits of having secondary students critically explore this question
In this theoretical paper, I argue that whether science is universal or culture-specific endeavor is a nature of science (NOS) question that needs to be explored critically by learners in a science classroom. Delimiting the discussion to precollege (secondary) science education, I discuss the educational benefits of such a proposal and evaluate its potential from a perspective of developing scientifically literate citizenry. I start the paper by discussing what critical thinking (CT) is and how it is fundamental for knowledge generation within the contexts of western science and indigenous societies. Next, I focus on the scholarly debates within science education circles on the role of culture in science. I highlight the fundamental role of CT in those debates. I point out a paradox: Despite its fundamental role, CT as an educational goal gets poorly featured in the recommendations of science education scholars regarding how school science education should portray the role of culture in science. On the contrary, most of those recommendations look upon the role of culture through specific ideological lenses and may lead to indoctrination. As an alternative, I suggest future citizens be empowered, in developmentally appropriate ways, by engaging in critical deliberation of assumptions and ideologies that underlie both science and their science learning. This entails bringing the debates on the role of culture in science into the science classroom and guiding the learners to explore them critically and in ways that are meaningful and useful for them as future citizens. I argue that such an approach brings CT into the foreground of the teaching and learning of NOS. It also empowers learners to develop a critical mindset with which they can practice making decisions about NOS. Additionally, it makes the teaching and learning of NOS more authentic—aligned with how scholars use CT as the main tool for engaging in philosophical debates and for producing their competing ideas. I illustrate an example to show how such a proposal could be enacted and discuss its implications for fostering scientific literacy.
Decidability of some intuitionistic predicate theories
Suppose T is a first order intuitionistic theory (more precisely, a theory of Heyting's predicate calculus, e.g., abelian groups, one unary function, dense linear order, etc.) presented to us by a set of axioms (denoted also by) T. Question. Is T decidable? One knows that if the classical counterpart of T (i.e., take the same axioms but with the classical predicate calculus as the underlying logic) is not decidable, then T cannot be decidable. The problem remains for theories whose classical counterpart is decidable. In [8], sufficient conditions for undecidability were given, and several intuitionistic theories such as abelian groups and unary functions (both with decidable equality) were shown to be undecidable. In this note we show decidability results (see Theorems 1 and 2 below), and compare these results with the undecidability results previously obtained. The method we use is the reduction-method, described fully in [12] and widely applied in [3], which is applied here roughly as follows: Let T be a given theory of Heyting's predicate calculus. We know that Heyting's predicate calculus is complete for the Kripke-model type of semantics. We choose a class M of Kripke models for which T is complete, i.e., all axioms of T are valid in any model of the class and whenever φ is not a theorem of T, φ is false in some model of M.