{"id":214,"date":"2015-06-05T22:01:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T22:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=214"},"modified":"2015-06-05T22:01:00","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T22:01:00","slug":"why-do-we-teach-the-earth-is-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=214","title":{"rendered":"Why do We Teach the Earth is Round?"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re no doubt asking yourself \u201cWhy the provocative title?\u00a0 It\u2019s obvious why we should teach that the Earth is round!\u201d In some sense, this was my initial reaction when this exact question was posed in a round table discussion that I participated in recently.\u00a0 The person who posed the question was undaunted by the initial pushback and persisted.\u00a0 Her point was simply a genuinely honest question driven by a certain pragmatism.<\/p>\n

Her basic premise is this.\u00a0 For the vast majority of people on the Earth, a flat Earth model best fits their daily experiences.\u00a0 None of us plan our day-to-day trips using the geometry of Gauss.\u00a0 Many of us fly, but far fewer of us fly long enough distances where the pilot or navigator consciously lays in great circle path.\u00a0 And even if all of us were to fly, say from New York to Rome, so what if the path the plane follows is a \u2018geodesic on the sphere\u2019, very few of us are either aware or care.\u00a0 After all, that is someone else\u2019s job to do.\u00a0 And certainly gone are the days where we sit at the seashore and watch the masts of ships disappear last over the horizon \u2013 cell phones and the internet are far more interesting.<\/p>\n

I listened to the argument carefully and mulled it over a few days and realized that there was a lot of truth in it.\u00a0 The points here weren\u2019t that we shouldn\u2019t teach that the Earth is round but rather that we should know with a firm and articulable conviction why we should teach it and that that criteria for inclusion should be open to debate when schools draw up their curriculum.<\/p>\n

So what criteria should be used to construct a firm and articulable conviction? It seems that at the core of this question was a dividing line between types of knowledge and why we would care to know one over the other.<\/p>\n

The first distinction in our round-Earth epistemological exploration is one between what I will call tangible<\/em> and intangible<\/em> knowledge.\u00a0 Tangible knowledge consists of all those facts that have an immediate impact on a person\u2019s everyday existence.\u00a0 For example, knowing that a particular road bogs down in the afternoon is a slice of tangible knowledge because acting on it can prevent me from arriving home late for dinner (or perhaps having no dinner at all).\u00a0 Knowing that the rainbow is formed by light entering a water droplet in the atmosphere in a particular way so that it is subjected to a single total internal reflection before exiting the drop with the visible light substantially dispersed is an intangible fact, since I am neither a farmer nor a meteorologist.\u00a0 Many are the people who have said \u201cdon\u2019t tell me how a rainbow is formed \u2013 it ruins all the beauty and poetry!\u201d<\/p>\n

An immediate corollary of this distinction is that what is tangible and intangible knowledge is governed by what impacts a person\u2019s life.\u00a0 It differs both from person to person and over time.\u00a0 A person who doesn\u2019t drive the particular stretch of road that I do would find the knowledge that my route home bogs down at certain times and the meteorologist would find the physical mechanism for the rainbow a tangible bit of knowledge, even if it kills the poet in him.<\/p>\n

The second distinction is between what I will call private<\/em> and common<\/em> knowledge.\u00a0 The particular PIN I use to access by phone is knowledge that is, and should, remain private to me.\u00a0 In the hands of others it is either useless (for the vast majority who are either honest, or don\u2019t know, or both) or it is dangerous (for those who do know me and are up to no good).\u00a0 Common knowledge describes those facts that can be shared with no harm between all people.\u00a0 Knowing how electromagnetic waves propagate is an example of common knowledge but knowing a particular frequency to intercept enemy communications is private.<\/p>\n

With these distinctions in hand, it is now easy to see what was meant by the original, provocative question.\u00a0 As it is taught in schools, knowledge that the Earth is round is, for most people, a common, intangible slice of human knowledge.\u00a0 In this context, it is reasonable to ask why we even teach it to the students.<\/p>\n

A far better course of action is to try to transform this discovery into a common but tangible slice of knowledge that effects each student on core level.\u00a0 The particular ways that this can be done are numerous but let me suggest one that I regard as particularly important.<\/p>\n

\"Fancy<\/a><\/p>\n

Teaching that the Earth is round should be done within a broader context of how do we know anything about the world around it, how certain are we, and where are the corners of doubt and uncertainty.\u00a0 A common misconception is that the knowledge that the Earth is round was lost during the Dark and early Middle Ages.\u00a0 The ancient Greeks knew with a great deal of certainty that the Earth was round and books from antiquity tell the story of how Eratosthenes determined the radius of the Earth to an astounding accuracy considering the technology of his day.\u00a0 This discovery persisted into the Dark and Middle Ages and was finally put to some practical use only when the collective technology of the world progressed to the point that the voyages of Columbus and Magellan were possible.\u00a0 Framing the lesson of the Earth\u2019s roundness in this way provides a historical context that elevates it from mere geometry into a societally shaping event.\u00a0 Science, technology, sociology, geography, and human affairs are all intertwined and should be taught as so.<\/p>\n

Along the way, numerous departure points are afforded to discuss other facets of what society knows and how does it know it.\u00a0 Modern discoveries that the Earth is not a particularly spherical (equatorial bulge) know take on a life outside of geodesy and the concepts of approximations, models, and contexts by which \u2018facts\u2019 are known and consumed now become tools for honing critical thinking about a host of policy decision each and every one of us has to make.<\/p>\n

By articulating the philosophical underpinnings for choosing a particular curriculum, society can be sure that arbitrary decisions about what topics are taught can be held in check. Different segments can openly debate what material should be included and what can be safely omitted in an above board manner.\u00a0 Emotional and aesthetic points can be addressed side-by-side with practical points without confusion.\u00a0 And all the while we can be sure that development of critical thinking is center stage.<\/p>\n

Failure to do this leaves two dangerous scenarios.\u00a0 The first is that student is filled with a lot of unconnected facts that improve neither his civic participation in practical matters nor his general appreciation for the beauty of the world.\u00a0 The second, and more importantly, the student is left with the impression that science delivers to us unassailable facts.\u00a0 This is a dangerous position since it leads to modern interpretations of science as a new type of religion whose dogma has replaced the older dogma of the spiritual simply by virtue that its magic (microwaves, TVs, cell-phones, rockets, nuclear power, and so on) is more powerful and apparent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re no doubt asking yourself \u201cWhy the provocative title?\u00a0 It\u2019s obvious why we should teach that the Earth is round!\u201d In some sense, this was my initial reaction when this… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}