Mark Kleiman suggests some real learning for journalism students; I go one better

With all due respect to Mark Kleiman and his proposal to better educate college journalism students, I believe his focus on journalism students is too narrow and on college students is too late in life.

Mark Kleiman suggests some real learning for journalism students; I go one better

1. Informal logic/critical thinking skills. Students need to be able to recognize fallacious arguments, types of fallacies, and good logical reasoning skills, in today’s mix of mass media, mass entertainment and government misspeak bombardment. Textbook: “The Skeptic’s Dictionary”* by Robert Carroll. No Aristotle or other dead ancients needed.
2. Numeracy skills and logical reasoning. Learning how to understand false positives vs. false negatives in medical tests, correlation vs. causation, and ways of better understanding probabilities, indeed better visualizing them. Textbook: “Calculated Risk” by Gerd Gigerenzer.
3. Philosophy of science. How can high school students understand a biology class, let alone understand how creationists and intelligent design touters deliberately distort findings of evolutionary biology, if they don’t understand what science is and how it is done? A fun secondary textbook, for use near the end of the course: “A Glorious Accident”* by Wym Kayzer. Picture about 10 of the world’s greatest scientists, one of the top philosophers of science and another important cognitive philosopher, all sat down at a Platonic symposium. Better yet, watch the PBS video.
4. Financial planning. How better to stop predatory lending practices by banks, credit card companies and other financiers to educate students about it before they reach the age of majority?
5. Political science without American Exceptionalism bias. Textbook: No question but that it’s “The Frozen Republic”* by Daniel Lazare.

Now, where to teach some of these classes? Philosophy of science would be one semester of a ninth-grade introduction to science curriculum. The informal logic class would a half-semester, followed by the numeracy skills.

The financial planning would be part of a half-semester, or semester, course on macroeconomics. The political science would be the half-semester at the first half of the traditional junior-year American history class. To get it in, if necessary, U.S. history gets one “lab” day or double-scheduled day a week in a block scheduling system, if necessary.

That said, here’s a summary of my original online comment to Klein’s blog post:

I am a left-liberal who finds the body of the Constitution archaic and anachronistic. (See Daniel Lazare's "The Frozen Republic" for more on this line of thinking.) I want the "separation of powers" taught ONLY if contrasted to a parliamentary government - and that system's pluses.

Cost-benefit analysis? Depends on who's teaching the class. You want Newt Gingrich or some clone indoctrinating students?

Cost-bennie analysis assumes that all things can be monetized. Cost-effectiveness assumes that we make decisions in a moral vacuum, as does cost-bennie analysis. No way to teach those two issues WELL without the moral dimension.

Eric's right. Much of this is neoclassical economics. Given Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is a relic of Enlightenment Deism and its' god-winding-up-the-clock-and-sitting-on-his-perfect-world-LazyBoy diety.

Mark left out: A class in informal logic/critical thinking. That way, the "ideas" of people like American Hawk would immediately be seen to be intellectually underfunded.

* = Amazon reviewed by me