Quote:
Originally Posted by Dirus  Books that are interesting, will lead to discussion and debate, and that most of these kids would never read otherwise. |
I still don't understand. Let's say you read Brian Greene's
The Elegant Universe. Where exactly are you hoping to take debate and discussion? You can't really debate whether certain things he presents are true or not---no one will have the expertise to determine that. The class could talk about their general impressions from the book, but I don't see how that's really anything other than superficial.
If your hope is to encourage them to go out and explore all the awesome stuff going on in science, why not start by filtering out all the pseudoscientific crap that surrounds us and the general mistrust that a lot of them (statistically) will have towards science. When a huge amount of the general population believes in stuff like a 6,000 year old Earth, astrology, ESP, homeopathy, magnet therapy, and all sorts of weird things it becomes hard to properly filter out what constitutes actual science and where people should be skeptical.
If you then wanted to talk about
The Elegant Universe or global warming or whatever else within the informal context of logical and scientific validity then hopefully you might inspire them to read up on some more mainstream science literature while at the same time leading them away from so many of the con artists. It doesn't have to be intensive either. If you want a laid back sort of senior elective class than there's lots of videos and stuff you can watch that are pretty entertaining---Penn & Teller's Bullsh*t, if you could get away with it.
I think the way it's structured now it's of limited educational usefulness, and that's where people like Dildo are comming from.