Customer Reviews

Connected Knowledge: Science, Philosophy, and Education

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Cromer has it exactly right. Education, along with much of the rest of our culture, has fallen into the hands of know nothings unable to solve the simplest arithmetic problem or explain the difference between astronomy and astrology. No wonder there are so many of them. Over half of US math and science teachers are not certified in those fields, and even more haven't taken a single college course in them.

Throughout the book Cromer takes on a number of deserving targets: (1)the standards movement - easy to write, impossible to implement; (2)constructivism and process learning; (3)content free learning; (4)social sciences & statistics (ever wonder why social scientists and educationists offer their own statistics courses?); (5)and so on.

Traditional education may have ill-served some of us, but what's being offered in its place is bad for all of us. We're being divided into educational haves and have nots, with the great majority of "average" studen! ts falling increasingly onto the side of ignorance.

I think this is a good book which makes some excellent points about the gulf between the social sciences and the "hard" sciences. As an educator of the hard sciences and a student of philosophy / art history, I found I could associate with many of the comments he made. The rational and hard-headed approach taken by the book will threaten and upset many researchers, curriculum developers, and educators in the social sciences and humanities. It will also undermine some of the questionable educational policies and strategies that are always popping up. While Cromer may stretch the strength of his arguments (presumably to make a point) they are fundamentally sound.

Cromer does a wonderful job when he stays on the topic he knows well, how to explain principles in physics. He also does an effective job of skewering postmodernist critics of science. However, the promise of "connected knowledge" is not fulfilled. Cromer makes connections the way a shotgun makes marriages. He can't make real connections among knowledge domains because he is ignorant (often arrogantly so) of the knowledge domains outside physics that are important to his thesis. If you are interested in science education, read this book but beware of serious errors in his discussion of human learning, evolution of language and the relation between thought and language, and most surprisingly, in his treatments of statistics.

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