Yeah, big deal. It’s been all over the Internet lately. Well, as an assignment for one of my university courses, I wrote a nice report on Comfort’s edition, comparing it to the original 1859 first edition, which we conveniently have a copy of in a library here on campus.

It was very revealing.

You can see the entire 11-page report here, though don’t be frightened by its length: it’s double-spaced and in a nice, large, easy-to-read font.

Enjoy, everyone! Feel free to spread this around the Interwebs as much as you’d like.

For the impatient, here are the highlights:

• Ray Comfort’s table of contents omits page numbers entirely, so you can’t skip to specific chapters. In fact, new chapters start in the middle of pages, and chapter headings are in tiny font, so you can’t even find chapters if you want to find a specific detail. It’s worthless as the edition for “universities and higher education” it claims to be on the back cover.
• The text of his Special Introduction is in a nice, large font, whereas Origin is in a tiny, unreadable font. It is painfully clear that Comfort does not even want you to read Origin, just his introduction.
• The nice, 12-page index is completely omitted.
• Darwin’s credentials, once present on the title page, are left out.
• The one figure included in the first edition, a nice tree of life diagram, is omitted, leaving four pages or so of Darwin blabbing about a figure illustrating his point with no actual figure to illustrate his point.
• Comfort’s claim that atheists wanted book-burnings and generally had a huge violent outcry is mostly unsubstantiated. Though one atheist on RichardDawkins.net calls Comfort out on his “ideological masturbation fantasy.” (Yeah, the paper’s worth reading just for that quote.)
• I did not, in fact, see much response at all from the religious online community, besides some criticisms of Comfort.

What does this lead me to believe? Well, here’s my conclusion:

Comfort’s edition of On the Origin of Species is not the product of a society that has rejected Darwinism. It is the product of a society that accepts Darwinism more than ever, whose acceptance has driven Ray Comfort to the conclusion that society is rejecting God. To a deeply religious minister, that is cause for action. Thus, a new Origin was produced, one designed to bring people back to God by emphasizing a religious message and discouraging anyone from even reading Darwin’s words. In his view, after all, Darwin is the man who drove them away from God in the first place.

This is no ordinary edition of Origins, with a nice introduction stating the “other side” of the story, as Comfort makes it out to be. It is an outright, but very subtle, attack. And it deserves to be treated that way.

Stupid system.

You see, it was clearly intended to be an introductory text, but it failed at that rather miserably. I’ll give an example. Here’s how the textbook introduces the basic technique used to find derivatives (derivatives can give you the slope of a graphed function at any point on the curve):

To find the tangent to a curve at a point we use the same dynamic procedure. We calculate the slope of the secant line through and a point . We then investigate the limit of the slope as . If the limit exists, it is the slope of the curve at and we define the tangent at to be the line through having this slope.

Whew. To figure out what that means, even to someone good at math, takes several moments of thinking to understand what the hell all the symbols and points and stuff are referring to, and how that gives the slope of a line. Compare the method used by the textbook to how Dave explained derivatives in his calculus tutorial (later edited and reposted by me). Sure, it’s longer Dave’s way, but you’re left actually knowing what is going on.

The textbook gets worse from there. It’d be more useful to someone who already understands the concepts and just wants to check some obscure property of logarithms or something. Understanding is buried beneath mounds of mathematical rigor.

If we want people to understand math, or at least not hate learning it, we’re going to have to make our textbooks less painful for a start. Take a look at the way Randall Munroe explains some basic physics in his blog: cartoon diagrams and jokes about death rays. Isn’t it so much more fun that way?

If I had more time on my hands, and if I could draw, I’d be writing a complete introduction to calculus. With stick figures, lasers, and actually understandable text.

Maybe I should try.

* Calculus: Graphical, Numerical, Algebraic, by Finney, Demana, Waits, and Kennedy.

I recently came across a like-minded blog post that spurred me into action. I’m a student: I can easily talk to dozens of teachers and students to get their opinions on the state of our education system. At the same time, I’m a website administrator: I can easily set up a website to spread my message.

These two facts collided shortly after I read the aforementioned blog entry. The Web is an amazing place to spread ideas and coordinate a grass-roots movement, so, why not? Assuming nobody’s done it before (tough assumption on the Internet), I think I have a new website to start.

What’ll it do? A variety of things, really. I think the key point will be to collect all of these ideas espoused in blog posts and personal websites into one neat and concise resource for students and teachers to read, then start spreading this around to teachers. If you’d like to help, or you know a blog post that has some helpful ideas, post a comment.

Ideally. I generally agree with the anti-grade crowd. I’m more pro-learning. But what can be done?

I was talking with a friend about this on Saturday, and she suggested a rather creative solution.

Ditch grades altogether.

This isn’t to say that teachers shouldn’t grade students’ work and that students could never fail a class because there’d never be a measure of “failing.” What I mean is that students would still take tests, and teachers would still grade them, but the student’s feedback would no longer be “You got a 74. Try harder.” It would be “You need to work more on your antiderivatives.” Numeric grades would be kept hidden away in a computer somewhere.

But before I go into the details, let’s take a closer look a the problem.

The Grade Delusion

High schools (or at least the ones I’ve seen) are incredibly grade-oriented. Most students (but not all) worry about their grades, always striving to keep grades above a certain threshold so their parents don’t apply whatever punishments parents apply these days. (Some kids, and parents, don’t care at all, of course, but that’s a separate problem.) I’ve watched students get exceptionally frustrated because they received an 89.9% average in a class instead of a 90% — the difference between a B and an A.

But why should they care about that tenth of a percent? Shouldn’t they be more concerned with learning stuff?

The trouble, as I see it, is that we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that grades are indeed a measure of learning, and thus that high grades mean lots of learning. (Unless learning isn’t the actual goal of school.) That is not necessarily the case. Most high school teachers give grades for various worksheets, projects, and even for “class participation,” rather than just for test performance. The final grade is then an average containing test performance (perhaps the best measure of learning we have), various worksheets that measure learning in different amounts, projects that may just measure how well one can insert information from Google into a PowerPoint, and how much the student is willing to talk in class.

Extra credit points (like teachers who give out points for students who donate books or take their textbooks to faraway locations) often don’t reflect learning at all — more often extra credit assignments are just extra work — and I think the whole idea sucks anyway.

Life Without Grades

So suppose we decide we want to encourage learning rather than grade-mongering. The two don’t always go hand-in-hand.

Step 1 on the road to learning: Remove grades from the picture.

If grades are removed from students’ view, students should no longer feel an obsessive need to get the highest grades possible — simply because they won’t get feedback. Exam grades should still be recorded, I think, but the student should receive subjective results (”you need to work on concept x”) rather than numeric ones. Those would be saved for later.

Where does the motivation to perform go?

Grades would still be released as part of transcripts to colleges, so colleges would know how well a student has learned in particular subjects. (Without grades, there’s no longer an inclination to add worksheets and funky projects into the grading system. One might say this would encourage students to not do them altogether, but I think a bit of freedom is good for teenagers anyway.) This means that a student would be inclined to do well on tests, but not obsessively inclined to be absolutely perfect all the time.

(This does, of course, bring up the question of “why not just make grades exam-based but still public?” Easy. Because then kids will still focus on their grades rather than learning. The thrust of the point here is that we need to make students obsess about understanding everything rather than scoring every point possible by picking out the easiest classes to take. Grades, though they are secret, will become a means of seeing how successful a student is at achieving this goal. Essentially, by removing grades, we remove the desire to maximize points, allowing for students to actually understand things and choose classes they’re interested in, rather than classes that will give them the greatest GPA advantage later on.)

Report cards, then, would be different: teachers would send home notes explaining what concepts the student is good at and what the student needs to work on. Parents would punish kids if they slack off and get told they’re not understanding everything, rather than if they fail because they left their homework assignment at home accidentally.

The whole paradigm shifts. Grades go from primary importance to being a secondary measure of success. World hunger ends. Climate change stops. Birds start chirping. You get the idea.

Open Questions

1. Will students lose motivation without direct qualitative feedback? They might. Qualitative feedback from teachers on how well the student is performing would have to be constant and detailed.
2. Does this mean we have to resort to having teachers pick the valedictorian? (Oh noes!)
3. Is it feasible to instill motivation to understand? This would have to be a ground-up change — start with young kids — and parents would have to evaluate qualitative report cards similarly to quantitative ones.

Someone go tell that to an English professor.

The field of English literature, as far as I can make out, has a lot to do with the “deeper meaning” of literary works. Read a book carefully, look at the techniques the author uses as part of his or her literary style, and you can make out the true purpose of the book. (Update: Perhaps I should make it clear that I am attacking is the “let’s find what the author intended” sort of analysis. Just analyzing the text, or seeing how the reader responds to it, makes sense. But you can’t extend that to find out what the author’s subtle purpose was.)

Sounds like metaphysics to me.

I may be corrupted by my science education, but seriously, I have several problems with literary analysis.

The first is, of course, simple: what if the author just wanted to tell a #($*ing story? The central axiom of literary analysis seems to be “it has a meaning — just find it!” Well, maybe it doesn’t. I know I’ve written pieces of poetry and then gone back and found all sorts of literary devices pointing at some central meaning, and I only found the meaning after I had written the stupid thing. It’s pretty easy to do.

The second problem is that literary analysis smells like metaphysics to me. Rather than looking at the testable — what happened in the book — we’re looking at the unverifiable: what the author was thinking when he wrote the book. We, of course, have absolutely no way of knowing (unless the government’s been doing things I haven’t heard about yet), but that never stops anybody. The literary analysis just keeps going, regardless of the fact that the author is probably dead already.

A scientist must always prove that his experimental findings are outside of the possibilities of random chance. He or she might run the experiment several times and then do a statistical test to see if the results could just be a fluke. Only when results are almost certainly not a random fluke are they reported.

Not so in literary analysis. Spotted an interesting use of parallelism and diction in the second paragraph? The author’s probably commenting on the unequal social status of women in the time period. Notice repetition of a few key words? They’re probably being emphasized to bring the emotional point home and highlight the cruelty of society. Never mind the fact that the author might just have decided those words sounded kinda cool there.

Let’s not forget the chance that the reader is picking out meaning where there is none due to predispositions and the human ability to find patterns everywhere. If people think there’s a face on Mars, they’ll think there’s a deeper meaning in a book, regardless of whether the author meant it.

So I think my problem with literary analysis is threefold: we have no way of knowing that the author actually meant what we think he meant, we don’t know if what we find is a coincidence, and it’s likely we’re finding patterns where there are none. And it’s boring to do, anyways.

How does that relate to education? Well, teaching has been client-server for a long time, with the “client” being your average student and the “server” being your average teacher. It’s a server-push system: the server pushes content to the client and hopes that it accepts and understands it correctly.

That’s kind of dumb.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) communication is more efficient in that it avoids the major bottleneck at the server end by distributing the teaching load among numerous nodes. This would be analogous to students teaching students (not students giving answers to students) what the teacher didn’t adequately explain.

Being one of the nodes in this P2P network, I see the benefits of it all the time. Students find it much easier to learn from their peers — when you have just learned the concept, you find it much easier to explain it to your peers. You still remember the thought process it took to get that concept to make sense.

But P2P learning, though I practice it regularly, is never truly encouraged. Students are supposed to go ask their teacher for help when they don’t understand — but why not encourage them to go ask that nerdy kid? It offloads the burden from the teacher and gives the school nerd some social skill practice. Teachers usually give their substitute teachers worksheets or videos to show — but why not encourage them to have the nerdy kid teach the lesson from the textbook while they’re gone?

It could work. It would certainly boost that nerdy kid’s ego.

Shermer’s point can be summed up with a few quotes:

More than any other reason, the reason people believe weird things is because they want to. It feels good. It is comforting.

Immediate gratification. Many weird things offer immediate gratification.

And finally, Shermer lists the last reasons as: simplicity, morality and meaning, and “hope springs eternal.”

I disagree.

I think I have a rather unique perspective on the issue. I’m looking at “weird things” (usually pseudoscience and other bogus claims) from the perspective of someone who regularly interacts with teenagers and the American education system. I watch people learning, and have made a hobby of looking at how, exactly, they learn.

It’s rather telling. But before I go into what I believe, let me look at what Mr. Shermer says and what I believe is wrong with it. To do so, I’d like to quote another one of his books, The Mind of the Market:

There appears to be a sharp distinction between how people view their own beliefs — as rationally motivated — and how people view the beliefs of others — as emotionally driven.

To me, Shermer has fallen into his own trap. He states that people believe in weird things for emotional reasons — exactly what the psychological bias would predict. I believe the true answer is somewhere between rational and emotional.

The fundamental problem is, in my opinion, is not that people don’t think and instead let their emotions take over; the problem is that they’ve never learned how to think. I’ve addressed critical thinking before, and I think it plays into the weird belief problem as well. (The blog post I just linked to explains part of the problem in more detail than I’ll go into here, so I suggest you read that as well.)

Let’s face it: a large number of weird beliefs could be discounted with some good old-fashioned thought. Astrology, for example, doesn’t take much besides common sense to discount: you’re telling me that stars millions of light-years away somehow alter my personality?

But, as I have said before, school teaches people how to do problems, not how to actually use knowledge to draw conclusions. Ask a student a question outside the bounds of his teaching and he will be lost, even if he has the knowledge necessary to figure it out. If nobody taught him how to do that specific type of question, he can’t. If nobody prompted him, saying, “so if a star is a million light-years away, what sort of effect can it have on you?”, then he will never pursue that train of thought.

So there’s the problem. No matter how much science we teach our children, they will still be unprepared to be thinkers in the face of “woo-woo”, as James Randi puts it. American students aren’t given the critical thinking skills required to help them analyze pseudoscience and know when it’s complete bunk. Critical thinking shouldn’t just be something students have to do on particularly irritating tests; it should be something they do as a habit, automatically, analyzing and thinking about everything they see.

I propose we make our science and math teachers force students to think. Give them problems outside the bounds of their teaching. There’s still hope.

I can understand this problem for people who get excessively nervous and can’t think when they take the test. But for people who take the test with a sound mind?

I think this is a problem of understanding. I don’t think “not being good at taking tests” is a fair excuse; the problem is far deeper.

Refer to my earlier post for details.