I think I’ve said before that I was raised by scientists. When possible, I try to explain things scientifically to my children. Obviously there’s a limit to their understanding at this point, but when they were scared of thunder and lightning recently, I told my daughter it wasn’t monsters (as she feared) but electricity in the sky, caused by hot air hitting cold air.
When my daughter was asking why ice turned into water, I explained the concept of change of state to her. I explained that ice, water and steam were all made up of the same little tiny invisible pieces, but the difference was in how fast they were moving. The explanation ran thusly:
When the water was made cold, the little pieces got much more still and close together (making the water solid – ice). When the water was made hot, the little pieces whizzed around very fast and were very far apart (making the water gas – steam). When the water was normal temperature, the little pieces were able to move around quite a lot, slipping and sliding, making them liquid. Then I drew a diagram to show the difference. My daughter then copied my diagram herself and showed her father, and explained it to him. Daddy, who is also a scientist, was most impressed.
My mother was over and observed the diagram. “I think they should teach change of state as soon as possible,” she said approvingly. “It’s a fundamental concept. Instead, they don’t introduce it until Year 10.” I was totally shocked.
How far should we try to teach things scientifically to our children? What kind of credence should we give to other explanations (myth or religious explanation)? When I was telling my daughter about the lightning, I said that some people in the olden days thought there was a big man called Thor sitting in the clouds throwing lightning bolts down like spears, but this wasn’t true. Still, his name is where we get the name of thunder from (the proto-Germanic word *thunaraz gave rise to Old Norse Þorr, German donner, Dutch donder as well as Old English Þunor which turned into thunder).
The Australian reports today:
School students will learn about Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, Chinese medicine and natural therapies but not meet the periodic table of elements until Year 10 under the new national science curriculum.
The curriculum, obtained by The Weekend Australian, directs that students from primary school through to Year 10 be taught the scientific knowledge of different cultures, primarily indigenous culture, including sustainable land use and traditional technologies.
I find it very interesting that indigenous myth and legend incorporates important information about the land and the people’s observations about the environment about them. It’s a valid form of knowledge. But…it isn’t really science, except in the most broad terms (in that it is an observation about how the world works). I don’t think indigenous myth and legend should be taught as science.
Science means “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.” Scientific method means carrying out experiments to ascertain how the world works. It is a particular product of the Western Enlightenment.
The idea is that you put up a hypothesis as to how a particular thing works, and you test that hypothesis. If you are seeking to establish the impact of sunlight on plant growth, for example, you may do a “control” experiment where you put a plant in normal conditions to show what happens if you change nothing. Other plants may be in the dark or in half light. Then you take the data and you draw a conclusion from it. It’s important to keep in mind Karl Popper’s “falsibility”. You can never actually confirm a scientific hypothesis, but if you disprove your thesis, it is decisive: it shows the thesis to be false. What can a scientist conclude then? A scientist can only conclude that for the time being the facts seem to be consistent with her thesis and thus her thesis has not been disproven.
Aboriginal myth and legend is not a series of scientific experiments. It is a religious, legal and spiritual explanation of the world which depends upon faith and cultural practice. Some of the elements of that explanation may match up with conclusions of the Western scientific method, which is very interesting, and shows that some parts of myth and legend may have a basis in empirical observation.
My parents recounted that when they visited Uluru, they were told by the non-indigenous guide in reverent terms that a particular cave was “Mala putu” (Mala’s pouch or the pouch of the female hare-wallaby). That’s not a scientific explanation of the cave, and it is not the pouch of the female hare-wallaby. However, some people believe that explanation, and their faith is fine by me. Just don’t try to pass it off as science or reality.
My worry is that if you start putting such observations up as science, you may end up having to give fair play to other non-scientific explanations of the world. Specifically, you are leaving it open to people to start claiming that their particular religious explanation of how the world was created is “scientific”. Do you end up having to give fair play to Ken Ham’s “Creation Museum” as “science”? Because that ain’t science. It’s faith.
I think the reason behind the desire to put indigenous culture into science teaching is a desire to make up for the oppression and ill-treatment of indigenous people in the past. There’s no doubt that indigenous forms of knowledge were disrespected, and indigenous people were written off as “savages” who were not worthy of being treated as equal human beings. (Although I note that whitefellas learned pretty quickly to be respectful of blackfella knowledge if they got stuck in the bush or needed a tracker to follow someone). But you don’t need to say that indigenous beliefs are scientific in order to give them respect.
Just because woo-woo is believed by people who have historically been victims doesn’t make it any less woo than the Abrahamic religions. It’s still woo, not science.
87 Comments
At my nominally Uniting Church school, stuff which fell into the rough category of things like Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, Chinese medicine, natural therapies, classical mythology, etc was taught in a subject called something like “Religion, Philosophy and Ethics.” I’m sure they went over highlights of the Bible in it at some stage (though I don’t remember it myself), but I remember being fascinated at one stage when “the Rev” drew a big comparative table on the blackboard with most of the major creation philosophies on it – and it was remarkable how similar they all were. I think that there really ought to be space in the curriculum, maybe just one hour a week, for something similar – for all those interesting bits and pieces that don’t fit into the curriculum anywhere else – and if it doesn’t bubble, squirm, grow or at least have the potential to explode, I’m not convinced it belongs in a science classroom ….
…then again, I went to a school described by Shane Moloney as one filled with kids whose parents felt guilty about sending them to a private school in the first place, and so offered Marxist agitpop as well as rowing ….
I think alternative perspectives on the world are a very valuable tool in teaching kids to think rather than accept. This could certainly be part of a “history of science” unit; indigenous land management could well be studied scientifically. Religion and belief systems certainly don’t belong in mainstream science, but I tend to be skeptical about The Australian’s reporting on Those Darn Lefties and Their Leftie Curriculum.
Is there any evidence that Aboriginal and other belief systems are being taught as scientific method, rather than, say, the same way as the history of the model of the atom?
Growing up, I’d always get lectures about why i didn’t learn theory XXXX in year Y like my elders did and how it wouldn’t prepare me for the real world.
Never really bothered me because It was always stuff taught as a sort trivia, the sort of thing that could be picked up later in life. With the periodic table in the article, All well and good to know that Boron is the 5th element, but if you don’t know why or what this implies, it’s useless.
My main complaint about my education (finished high school in 1999, degree in IT in 2003,) was a lack of synchronicity between different subject areas and the relearning of certain things many times.
an anecdote: basic logic. The “All cats Meow. Joe is a cat. Therefore Joe meows, is this valid y/n?” type of problem.
I was first introduced this in primary school year 5 and some more in year 6. It was covered briefly in high school in year 8 maths. Then again in either year 9 or 10 English.
Come university, first semester of my Bachelor of IT, one of the courses ‘Technical Communication.’ Lo and behold, “All dogs bark. Fred is a…”
Every time it was treated as if this were a brand new concept to me. (was also covered in a discrete maths course later on in my degree, but in a ‘You’re an idiot if you don’t know this already’ way.)
Lilacsigil, I don’t know the exact context in which these things are taught. But I’d agree with you that they would be fine in a subject which dealt with history of science or something like that.
The problem I have is that the basic building blocks are not being taught until too late (like the Periodic Table and change of state). There’s no point presenting alternative points of view if you don’t have a mainstream point of view to compare it with.
I’m old-fashioned with my view of education. I believe that you have to have straw before you can make bricks, intellectually speaking. So you have to teach the fundamentals first and then teach the alternatives. It’s no good teaching the alternatives first, and only teaching the fundamentals of science later.
I speak as someone who went through the Victorian education system, and then at the age of 14 or 15, went to a highly rigourous intellectual English school. The latter was a revelation to me. I found that I did not have the basics all my classmates did. My knowledge was piecemeal, and I had to work like hell to get up to standard. However, once I learned the basics, I found that I could do marvellous things. It’s only once you know what the fundamentals are that you can move away from them and question them.
So – no problem with Aboriginal viewpoints being presented as a history, or of the ways in which Aboriginal knowledge can inform scientific knowledge. I just want schools to teach the basics first.
And as a kid, I despised touchy-feely subjects; these were generally devoid of any really intellectual challenge. But I still remember that in Grade 2, we did a scientific experiment with wheat seeds where some were grown in salt water, some in the dark, some in sugar water, one in coffee, and some control seeds. I loved it. I drew meticulous diagrams of the wheat seeds and their state of growth. I loved the way the seeds in the dark sprouted yellow and grew all thin and spindly towards the crack of light in the cardboard box. (Although I felt a bit sorry for those ones too.) When I was doing A-Level Biology, I learned that there was a word for plants like that (‘etiolated’) and I was so excited.
Great comments from everyone so far. Going through this right now with my young kids, my attitude is similar to LE’s strategy with her daughter. Introduce them to amazing scientific processes they can really see, and actually run their own experiments. I question the usefulness of teaching young kids pure scientific “facts.” Remember, these kids still believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy!
The different states of H20 from gas (water vapor in green house terms) to liquid to ice can teach them so much, and actually using ideas they understand viscerally – hot and cold.
I have divided my tuition into “Nature” which is designed to explain to them processes they can clearly see, such as water to gas. I call this arm Nature
The other I call Discovery which is ‘Experiments For Kids’. My favorite is the importance of the difference between mass and weight, which I demonstrated using holiday luggage, lunch boxes, water bottles, and backpacks from our hotel balcony on a family holiday, but that is a whole different story!
well my kid learned about change of state (in basic terms) in primary school.
I think it is incorrect that they don’t teach it until Year 10. My niece is in Year 8 this year and she knows it. Her younger sister in year 4 or 5 this year does not.
moi and Senexx, it probably depends to a large degree on (a) which State you live in and (b) what curriculum your school teaches.
I speak as someone who went through the Victorian education system, and then at the age of 14 or 15, went to a highly rigourous intellectual English school.
I also went through the Victorian state school system in small, rural schools, and then went to a Japanese school and had no trouble at all (except with the language!) so I think your personal experience is just that – personal experience. I certainly learned about change of state and did experiments in primary school, and it was a tiny, underfunded, rural state school drawing from a largely underprivileged area (with a small group of middle-class kids like me from a newer housing development).
I know the Australian is derided as the ‘Opposition Organ’ in some circles, and often that criticism is fair, but from the perspective of someone who has had to teach at universities in both Australia and the UK, I’ve come to the conclusion that the rather old-fashioned criticisms of ‘leftie’ education ring true.
You can call these criticisms conservative if you like, but then creationists are conservative too, which puts them in the same category as believers in the rainbow serpent. None of these foundation myths are new, and there is evidence that the Australian Aboriginal versions may be tens of thousands of years old.
I tend to think that these kind of criticisms are liberal, and arise out of the liberal view that all knowledge is not equal. No-one, these days, wants to confront the basic fact that most of the stuff that makes life worth living was thought up by Western Europeans and Chinese. Rather than confront this and try to work out why it is the case, we have instead attempts to (a) appropriate Western European and Chinese achievements (of which the Afro-Centric movement is a prime example) or (b) attempts to valorize all forms of knowledge as equal, of which this curriculum is an example.
All of it is part of a wider movement to make people feel good about themselves (self-esteem) before they actually do something (self-worth).
There is a good review of the main scholarly debunking of Afro-Centrism — and the latter’s similarity to creationism — here.
[Update: can I also add a good word for Justine Ferrari, the journalist who wrote this piece at the Oz? I seldom have a good word to say about any journalist, but I have actually met Justine, and she is one of the few who attempted to report accurately the dust-up over my first novel, and is careful and conscientious. As evidence of this, I'll point out that I have no idea what her politics are, something I am generally capable of spotting in people roughly 30 seconds after I've met them].
Part of the point of the post is that there’s no consistency in what kids are taught. So you might hit the jackpot, like lilacsigil, and get great teachers who are conscientious, or you might luck out. As indicated in comments, some people learn change of state in primary school, some learn it in Year 7, some in Year 8, or whenever. At least a national curriculum means that there’s some consistency in what is taught.
I did have some great teachers at primary school. One was the relief teacher in Grade 2 who did the wheat experiment, and it’s because of her that I barrack for the Tigers – I wanted to be like her. I also had a really good teacher in grades 4 and 5 who taught us science and geography and all kinds of cool stuff. I’d like to find him and thank him. But what we were taught was really a bit hit and miss, from what I recall.
So yes – I welcome the idea of some kind of basic framework everyone has to learn – it makes it much easier if you change schools or states.
But I really don’t like the idea that you present alternatives before you present some important aspects of the mainstream. We just have to be careful with the way we teach, I think, and remember that while the mainstream is old hat to us, it’s new to many kids.
The draft national curriculum (English, Maths, Science, and History) can be downloaded from The Age site.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/backtobasics-approach-for-australias-classrooms-20100227-pa8t.html
I think it’s pretty obvious that science is not well established in peoples’ minds generally. Few people are aware of what they actually know and how they actually know it. The basis of science skepticism is not well established and I reckon this might be because it’s taught too late.
Mythology, religion etc can unfold Truth but it’s a literary truth. Something beyond empirical facts and the distinction should be made very clear.
If instead of using the word “science” we used say “Knowledge and Investigation/Discovery,” we can get a really neat course that starts from the Dreaming (and even the Neandertals) onto mythology, cosmology, ritual, religion, poetry, arithmetic, history, philosophy, theology/metaphysics, natural philosophy, geometry, trigonometry, physics, astronomy, and then on to ‘Science.’
The benefit of this progression is that it reveals why and how earlier forms of ‘Knowledge and Investigation/Discovery’ collapsed and had to give way to the newer and better.
I think that is the best way for kids to learn when it is OK to make definitive judgements – “young earth creationism is wrong – with more nuanced judgements – “no, the sun does not revolve around the earth, but boy was that Aristotle a genius in the way he modeled the role of Earth in the cosmos.” So, they will be able to say, “gee weren’t the Aborigines neat coming up with that cosmology 40,000 years ago? Of course, as a scientific explanation of the physical world, it is a load of nonsense.”
Let us hope that is what the Curriculum Czars intend.
Probably because students are taught in batches, rather than as individuals. The current system of education is built from the premise that it is economically impossible to customise the teaching on the fly to what the student already knows.
If one student is behind the class from the beginning, they place a disproportionate weight on the teacher’s time and attention. After a certain point it ceases to be rational to bring those students up to speed, and so the teacher switches to assuming very little prior knowledge and teaches to the lowest common denominator.
At higher levels teaching is meant to assume that the students in front of them have passed through a series of verified knowledge gateways before reaching them. In software engineering we call this approach the ‘waterfall’ process and we generally know that it sucks — especially when there’s outside pressure to advance through the stages regardless of actual progress.
From the link Peter provided at 13, change of state will be part of the year 8 curriculum, which does seem rather late. How for eg can you discuss volcanic eruption (year 6) without referring to the change of state involved in the formation of lava?
I really doubt that the Science and Culture part of the curriculum will be attempting to portray all historical forms of knowledge as equally valid. It seems more that they have attempted to show that knowledge has accumulated over time, and that some traditional knowledge is proving to be valid and useful in the present. There seems to be a particular emphasis on land management practices and as I understand there are useful strategies arising from studying indigenous land management practices. Similarly, some traditional medicines are pharmacologically active eg abortifacients, antiseptics and antibiotics, and some cultures did make detailed observations of the relative movements of stars and lunar progressions.
I think the article is alarmist in tone and the headline is just plain nonsense. The inclusion of the scientific aspects of traditional knowledge in one of four topics relating to the history and nature of science becomes “Dreamtime first”. Unless the document she has is significantly different to the outline linked to in the Age this is a beatup worthy of Windy.
The only way a “science and culture” stream is acceptable, or of long term economic value to a society, is if it instills woo-detectors in kids as early as possible, and a reflexive rejection of woo. (When woo rules the world, we have Dark Ages… oppression… etc, etc).
Besides, the modern asian worldview is pretty much “woo is bad… Popper good”. Are we going in the opposite direction?
The problem is, the more accepting of woo-ish outlooks, the more vulnerable you are to advertising, whether by corporations to become a good little consumer, or by the major political parties with the bigger budgets… and almost exactly the same policies.
“The Age” is talking about a “back to basics”, but pretty much on how to spell.
A home education, by rational parents, is looking more attractive.
Seriously, Dave, my husband and I were talking about the possibility of home education last night.
I actually learned very little from primary school. By the time I got there I could already write, read, add and spell. In Grade 1 my mother was told that my reading was “far too good”, and she needed to stop me reading proper books and bring me back down to a normal level. I was apparently reading my Grade 1 “readers” upside down to make them more interesting.
The main lesson I learned from primary school was that it’s really bad to be an intelligent sensitive kid. Particularly an intelligent sensitive kid who suffers from a disability.
Once, when I was in Grade 2, the teachers were asking who could play a musical instrument. I put up my hand, and when the teacher asked me to speak, I announced that I could play the piano and the recorder and I’d also taught myself some guitar too. The teacher’s lip curled. “Aren’t you a little smarty pants?” she said sneeringly, and the class sniggered.
One of the things I don’t like about Australia is that exact mentality – that if you’re any good at anything, you’re a little smarty pants who needs to be pulled down a peg or two. Oh yeah, I forget – unless of course, you’re good at sport in which case you will be lionized.
David: “The only way a “science and culture” stream is acceptable, or of long term economic value to a society, is if it instills woo-detectors in kids as early as possible”
Except I wonder whether it wasn’t the attitude that science should only encompass the practice of science and the facts gained thereby and consequently the leaving the field of ‘history of science’ to cultural theorists that lead to widespread disdain for science and acceptance of any old woo in the first place. Forget his name now but one of the main prosecutors of the science wars did make a connection between their attacks on science and the rise of woo and bizarre conspiracy theories.
The main lesson I learned from primary school was that it’s really bad to be an intelligent sensitive kid.
.
That’s why they have schools.
LE@19: “I actually learned very little from primary school.”
I was lucky… a school of “old style” teachers who ignored what developing “political correctness” there was in the 60s… while not allowed to bump a couple of us up a grade… we’d spend a term “visiting” the grade above, or they’d teach us to grind flour to make bread, or bring along their own “class set” of fretsaws, plywood, and other crafty stuff to use. (Cannot imagine modern parental paranoia letting 40 middle-primary kids use saws, lino-cutting tools, etc, being supervised by one teacher.). The same teacher made “reading machines” – variable speed blinds that gradually covered a page, with questions afterwards to see how well you’d understood the page, and set individually for each student to be a /little/ too fast.
I remember occasionally being dragged out of prep by the fourth-grade teacher across the corridoor, and asked do some maths… I realize now he was shaming the laziest in his class…. again, something you cannot do these days with “ooooh, musn’t offend little Timothy’s sensibilities”.
But, the teachers had problems handling me… I hated “rods” for maths (perhaps then-undiagnosed color blindness may have had something to do with it). The curriculum demanded we be able to use rods for basic maths in prep… and I’d “use” them by using them to create the characters “9 – 5 = 4″, and get “please David, when the school inspector is here tomorrow, don’t do that!” In other words, letting the inspectors see what the kids could /really/ do was asking for trouble – even for kids that “upped the average”.
Later the teachers had nutted out what to do quite often, if I felt WAY ahead, I’d play up so they had an excuse to eject me from class so I could do my own thing, and if another student was holding the rest of the class up, that student would be sent to me to take them through it step-by-step. Again, that’s something teachers probably can’t get away with these days.
su@20 talks the dangers of leaving history of science’ to cultural theorists.
Good point. But can you see the history/philosophy of science and culture (and comparative theology for that matter), being taught /correctly/, instilling the woo detectors? Seeing the problems that are the result of woo dominance in a society? I can’t, not when there is a push to be “culturally sensitive”, not when the “people of faith” are in the political power seats they are today… more than they were a couple of decades ago.
It looks like there will be positive spin put on the one-or-two things where selective squinting can put a particular woo in a good light, while avoiding those areas where the woo’s credibility would be totally destroyed because the results of that worldview are so damn stupid. It’ll be little different as far as promiting balanced understandings of world views as highlighting the way Hitler unified the Volk… without all the other less savory bits seeing the light of day.
LE/Dave
I am a member of an informal group of friends and extended family who are quite seriously investigating the feasibility of a half-way house between home-schooling and a private school. Our main motivation is a passionate objection to the state’s (whether state or federal) control of the curriculum. And especially the sorts of curricular in Australia, which are so over-the-top control freakish, with NO time for teacher or school initiatives.
Having looked over each of the Maths, Science, History, and English draft curricular The Age linked, I became increasingly stunned at all this stuff about Aborigines from Kindergarten to Year 10, and right across every single subject. Especially, with the added demands that students WILL “appreciate and respect” every bit of Aboriginal culture war stuff they have included.
These curricular have clearly been written by large committees of ideological stakeholders. To this extent, Gillard reveals she is in fact potentially a very, very shrewd and clever politician.
She and Rudd can run the “back to basics and 3Rs” mantra they – partially correctly – think are necessary to achieve buy-in from those ‘Howard Battlers’ who left the public system due its perceived lack of ‘values.’ Then on the other hand, Krillard can satisfy other constituencies such as the Aboriginal Industry, and the middle-class postmodernist ‘Cultural Left.’
But somehow, I don’t like Krillard’s chances of being able to keep the Battler’s in the dark about the sops to the Aboriginal Industry and ‘Cultural Left,’ both of whom are the Battler’s bete noire.
Let’s hope all this doesn’t blow up as ‘Culture Wars Round II’
su
Actually, History and Philosophy of Science (one of the majors of my B.Sc) was a respectable and thriving academic discipline long before the cultural theorists baled out of Marxism.
The really interesting political question is just how did the latter – overwhelmingly completely unschooled in Science/Maths since they were in Year 10 – so quickly and so convincingly conquer that space, establishing noisy and politically-savvy satellites in the schools and universities?
I’ve only read the science outline but I cannot see any overriding emphasis on Aboriginal traditional knowledge. What is actually written seems entirely reasonable. The word dreamtime doesn’t even appear and the only specific discussion of Aboriginal knowledge relates to land management and observations of seasonal changes, plants and animals. Nowhere in that document does it talk about appreciating and respecting Aboriginal Culture.
In a subject addressing the history of science what is unreasonable about teaching the earliest known examples of scientific observation and technology on this continent? The other cultures mentioned are Egypt, Greece, China and the Arabic cultures – all pretty worthy examples I think, especially as relates to the history of astronomy.
Perhaps science teachers have changed since I was at school but I can’t see them conniving at the dignifying of homeopathy and astrology as science though the latter has a place in the history of science because just about all early astronomers had to do it, even if they didn’t much fancy it – a good opportunity to discuss the difference between science and wishful thinking.
In one of my stats courses they listed the r values for a range of higly respectable medical treatments. I think people would be quite surprised to learn how low some of them are. There is a certain degree of woo hiding in plain sight and I suspect that the placebo effect is much more powerful in regular medicine than is commonly acknowledged. This is bad news for me, because some of those r values are permanently emblazoned on my brain and my placebo function is now borked.
su
It is best if we continue this discussion after you’ve read the other 3 curricular as well. They are purposely designed to be integrated. And don’t get me wrong, I have nothing at all against my children being taught about the Dreamtime and anything else about Indigenous or any other culture. But that is a different point altogether.
Is it just me or does anyone else find the idea of having a nationally standardised curriculum a little scary? How can we expect teachers to use any initiative if they have a straitjacketed approach to what they can teach? Surely education is where we need some measure of innovation?
And LE, I think that a history of science/history of ideas subject is great as long as its delineated from science proper. I know that learning a bit of legal history has been essential to my understanding of law and the little bit of scientific history I’ve read has been fascinating.
Ok the maths curriculum gave me pause with the statement that “It is imperative that all Australian students learn from the wisdom of the first Australians.” I hate that “wisdom of the ancients” BS, it is patronizing and pretty racist actually. They used mathematical concepts reflective of their environment and the kind of societies they formed in order to live in that environment. That is knowledge with utility for their society not bloody wisdom. But I think it is really valuable to point out the ways that concepts of time for example vary between societies. It is much more variable than number concepts. It could be an interesting digression that enlivens the imagination a bit before diving back into binomials.
If any part of the curriculum is likely to be overly politicized it is the English curriculum but really, wasn’t it ever thus? I was taught English by a bunch of teachers who had either narrowly escaped the draft or had been to Vietnam, their politics were really front and centre as we trudged through One Day of the Year. That was slightly preferable to the execrable novels of US origin deemed to be relevant to us as the youf of the day. I can’t imagine the proposed curriculum could be any more dull and deadening than it was in the eighties.
Absolutely, I hate that BS too. The other side of the Noble Savage myth is that real people can’t possibly ever match up to it, and then they’ll be judged for human foibles which we all share. People are people, you get wise ones and unwise ones in every bunch.
There are three areas where the ancients are just as relevant today as they were back when, and more so right than their modern groupies: politics; historiography; and ethics.
There is a certain degree of woo hiding in plain sight and I suspect that the placebo effect is much more powerful in regular medicine than is commonly acknowledged.
A recent Australian study argued exactly that. So much is obvious. Years ago I found a number of studies which demonstrated a simple classical conditioning paradigm could increase interferon levels. Interferon is very important in viral and cancer defence.
The placebo effect is largely treated as a statistical artefact. Silly. Almost as silly as those, who upon hearing that some alternative medicine helped someone, assert that is just the placebo effect. Where’s the evidence it is the placebo effect, whatever that effect is? So much for a scientific mindset. It’s funny, we can’t measure so we ignore it.
Actually, by rights, ‘The Dreaming’ should be mauled far more aggressively than even any ‘young earth creationist’ had ever experienced.
Any Aboriginal Industry teat-sucker caught peddling this ‘Indigenous’ porn should get it with both barrels. In fact, all of us here should feel obliged to so pummel this woo, that its hucksters will never breathe again.
[Whoa, Peter, that's a bit harsh; tone it down there -- ADMIN]
On one hand I agree with Nick that the thought of a boiler-plate national curriculum gives me pause. It seems we’re moving towards a French-style education system where everyone across the whole country is taught exactly the same stuff at the same time in lock-step, with no possibility of teacherly innovation. This is certainly not the Anglophone tradition.
On the other hand, there is a lot of woo out there and as Su mentions it does seem to have emerged in the wake of historical perspectives on science that don’t seem to understand either science or the extent to which science is intimately bound up with human progress.
On the third hand (I’m the blog admin, so I get to have three hands), if the woo is ensconced in the national curriculum, then we’re all rather rogered. The trick will be homeschooling your kids so that you’re not lumped in with people who think that homeschooling revolves around teaching the tackers that ‘on the sixth day, the Lord created Smith & Wesson’.
Gah.
I think I’ve mentioned it before, but given a mandate to provide national education standards I would have saved a lot of time and bother by handing out subsidies to public schools to start offering the International Baccalaureate. The middle-years stuff is a bit fluffy but the actual Diploma program in years 11 and 12 is an academic heptathlon.
On the third hand (I’m the blog admin, so I get to have three hands), if the woo is ensconced in the national curriculum, then we’re all rather rogered.
The danger of teaching the Dreamtime stories to children is that it might make them contemptuous of aboriginal culture.
As for teaching Chinese medicine and natural medicine give me a break. Look, I know there are valuable ideas in alternative medicine but I know that because I have tracked down scientific studies on the same. Contrary to what some believe there does now exist a good body of research into these therapies. From this it emerges that some of these approaches have value. For example, insight meditation, Tai Chi, and Yoga clearly have benefits for some conditions.
The draft report for the curriculum will be released and available for comment tomorrow at this link:
http://www.acara.edu.au/home_page.html
If traditional technologies and Chinese medicine have so much to offer then please explain to me why our approach to these matters is so much more powerful. People may embrace Chinese Traditional Medicine I just hope they embrace it with the knowledge that the Chinese are slowly abandoning it and embracing modern western medicine.
SL, as you have three hands I assume you do know the sound of one hand clapping?
Any Queenslander with a mere two hands who has ever lived in an inadequately screened house knows the sound of one hand clapping. The sound of one hand clapping is a mosquito spattered wall.
Is there a reason to believe that Dreamtime stories, in particular, are going to be taught outside of that context? Even this alarmist article contextualises the Dreamtime in that way; it’s given as an example of an investigation into “historical examples of different cultures’ knowledge about the national environment and living things”.
One of the other examples given, the seasons, makes perfect sense: there are six seasons here, that correlate better with what is going on locally than the arbitrary Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter we imported. I see no reason why kids shouldn’t learn (and learn early) that ideas based on Northern European environment don’t necessarily make sense here, or at least that they aren’t the only way of looking at the world around us; and perhaps they might start to get an inkling into looking at why those ideas are still so embedded.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the rather old-fashioned criticisms of ‘leftie’ education ring true”
Apart from a small number of subjects that might suffer from bias (like history), I think the politicization of what is being taught into left and right is just crazy. Being taught phonics, for example, is good, and not being taught it is bad. That doesn’t matter whether you’re a communist or a member of the religious right. Yet people now make it a political statement. The same is true of things like grammar and mathematics, which also seems to have hit the political football.
Lauredhel, that is a very interesting point about the seasons. I was trying to explain to my daughter why there were all these snow-covered Christmas cards about and our own weather looks nothing like it. So you can use indigenous perspectives to show that there are different ways of looking at it.
But I just don’t see how you can make much out of bush tucker and science for primary school kids, for example. What indigenous people learned they could and couldn’t eat is certainly interesting information, but it’s not particularly scientific. Just smells like tokenism to me.
When I was a kid we had some indigenous people come to the school and show us stuff which was really great. It wasn’t science or maths or art or anything, it just was. Rather than squeezing indigenous culture into western boxes where they don’t particularly fit (“science” etc), I think would have been better to have a separate curriculum about how indigenous knowledge could be successfully taught in schools if that’s what they wanted to achieve.
This is true, unfortunately, and very sad.
I’m totally with you, Conrad. Phonics works, whole word doesn’t. Why on earth should it be a right left thing? Doesn’t make any sense!
The History curriculum looks very impressive for a university level suite of courses, but I am not at all confident it is manageable at the school level.
From Years 7 to 10, a year is devoted to each of: beginnings to the Ancient world; 500 AD to 1750AD; Australia and the Modern World 1750 to 1901; Australia and the World in the 20th century.
I wonder how many history graduates who go into Teaching have such a comprehensive education in World History demanded by this curriculum, especially given the time constraints?
Today’s Age reports on concerns it is too ambitious in its breadth, and that
the national history curriculum could be a failure if the subject is placed in the hands of bored or ill-trained teachers.
Still, I suppose such discussion is precisely what public release of a draft curriculum is designed for.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/history-curriculum-could-fail-20100228-pb7q.html
http://www.theage.com.au/pdf/HistoryK-10.pdf
I got taught a whole bunch of unmitigated mythological crap as fact in school. My parents might have consented to this, but I didn’t.
Worse, we weren’t even allowed to critically debunk teachings based on their own internal mythical reference points.
The fact that this wasn’t packaged as ‘science’ doesn’t stop someone like Tony Abbott graduating from one of the schools I went to believing that the stuff is true, and trying to infuse it into high level policy.
As to the basic argument in the post, I’d agree, myth should be taught as myth- and across the board in every school. Dreamtime shouldn’t be part of science, although I’d ad that year 10 seems a reasonable age to start drumming home something as boring as the periodic table. We want kids interested in science- let them blow up frogs and so forth when they’re younger…
“unmitigated mythological crap” This was a slightly ranty response, because I do get annoyed at what I perceive to be different weightings given to some belief systems over others.
I’ve got no desire to offend people and in fact am agnostic precisely because I accept that, although I don’t believe the stuff I was raised on really anymore, I don’t have all the answers, nobody’s perfect, anything’s possible, etc.
So with apologies for being rude to belief systems, I retract that and substitute “I got taught a whole bunch of mythological materials as fact…” With respect…
From Years 7 to 10, a year is devoted to each of: beginnings to the Ancient world; 500 AD to 1750AD; Australia and the Modern World 1750 to 1901; Australia and the World in the 20th century.
.
Except for the emphasis on the Middle Ages that’s what I was taught pretty much. It’s out of date.
I’d start with an over view of hunter-gatherer peoples. Then proceed to the origins of civilization in four locations. Chart the development of Western civilization: Sumeria, Egypt, Babylon, Minoa. Then do Greece and Rome and so forth. Ideally however electives would be available so you could study other streams of civilization: Sino-Japanese, Mesoamerican etc.
I have my doubts that history grads have the competence to teach such.
“Australia and the Modern World 1750 to 1901″
.
Do you just mean the modern world? Did anything happen in Australia between those times?
.
How about: “Not much happened, except for a few fights with the locals, and, apart from a bit of genocide in Tassie and a few other places, that’s a good thing. We also became the only country whose government almost fell due to there not being enough booze. This was celebrated by one of Australia’s modern prime ministers by being a first-class drunk. There are a few other heroes you might have heard of, like Ned Kelly, but since they didn’t invade other countries, conquer people, perform brutal acts on huge numbers etc. etc. their main importance is to show how unimportant Australia history really is. And that’s a good thing also”
Nice article in Lawyers’ Weekly magazine! I got very excited when I saw mention of you and your blog. I was like, “I was reading Skepticlawyer before it was famous!”
Conrad you should write a book. I’ve never seen the history and culture of this country summarized so well.
Amanda, thanks for the heads up. Maybe LE knew about Lawyers’ Weekly, but I certainly didn’t. You wouldn’t have a link to hand by any chance?
I’m sceptical and an agnostic. Nevertheless I’d like to avoid “science good, non-science bad”, even by implication.
There may be a way out of this. It may be to introduce children (and perhaps even adults) to this idea: There are different ways of understanding the world. Science is one of them.
I think science has been spectacularly effective for those fields in which it works. There are lots of fields that it doesn’t yet address, though. It can fall down badly when extended beyond its boundary of application.
Even in the fields it does address it doesn’t define “truth”. (This is akin to Popper’s argument). It defines a tentative “best theory”, or sometimes competing “potentially best theories”. Any theory most probably will be improved eventually, or discarded for a better alternative.
So science isn’t the provisional knowledge it produces. It’s the methods for producing that provisional knowledge. And those methods, too, are a sort of provisional theory. They, too, will eventually be improved or discarded for better methods.
In other words, it is no doubt useful for children to learn the “state change” concept. I think it is even more useful for them to learn the value of the methods of science — methods for exploring and understanding the phenomena which “state change” describes.
And to be healthily sceptical about them.
Last night I was having a discussion about this issue and the idea was raised that we need to understand other cultures because we live in a multicultural society.
My question is this: I challenge the idea that we need to understand other cultures. All I have to do is tolerate other peoples’ point of view without necessarily agreeing with it. I do not need to understand their culture or point of view, I simply need to not give them grief. Am I missing something?
While I’m here. I find it odd that they should teach chinese and alternative medicine. What about modern medicine? Lesson one, first statement:
If not for the creation of vaccines anywhere between 10-20% of the people in this classroom would be dead. If not for other modern medical interventions a further 10% would be dead or in some way left with permanent injury.
Sorry, I don’t even know if Lawyers’ Weekly is online. I just happened to pick up the copy in our tea room and saw it. If you get completely desperate I could scan the article and email it to you.
Sorry SL – meant to tell you that someone from Lawyer’s Weekly contacted me, but then I came down with the dreaded gastro bug which put it right out of my mind. The woman is going to send me a copy, apparently, so I’ll scan it in and send it to you.
Can someone show me where traditional Chinese medicine and natural therapies are listed in the new curriculum? I can’t find it.
Geoff Mc
Can someone show me where traditional Chinese medicine and natural therapies are listed in the new curriculum? I can’t find it.
Nor could I. May have been in earlier drafts or just a media beat up.
Adrien
The Year 7 History syllabus covers all that pre-historic stuff, Neolithic Revolution, etc.
Though I wonder about the strict linear treatment. I didn’t study any of that pre-Egypt/Greece/Rome history until university, where at least I had an appreciation of states, laws, religion, warfare, technology, etc. I imagine it will take a skilled History teacher to get her Year 7 students into that stuff, before her next class teaching Greek tragedy, the next Constantine and the Council of Nicea, the next George III’s Instructions to Captain Cook, then the Arab-Israeli conflict, and last for the day, the last time South Sydney won a Grand Final!
Far too little analysis of total war in the 20th century for my liking. Too much risk of history repeating itself, too little effort expended to trying to learn lessons from these apocalyptic failures that occurred just a lifetime or less ago.
John H – I challenge the idea that we need to understand other cultures. All I have to do is tolerate other peoples’ point of view without necessarily agreeing with it. I do not need to understand their culture or point of view, I simply need to not give them grief. Am I missing something?
.
Three things.
.
1. Australia is composed of people from all over the globe. So other peoples’ cultures are also ours
.
2. We live in a progressively more integrated globe. So we will be moving toward a global understanding of history.
.
3. History teaches us to avoid past follies. I’m sure the Chinese have fucked up royally in the past; we can learn from that as well.
So we will be moving toward a global understanding of history.
So you think we’ll develop the historical equivalent of a “theory of everything”? Nah.
History teaches us to avoid past follies.
It is completely impractical to expect most people to sufficiently examine other cultures so as to become adequately informed about the same.
Understanding a person’s culture is no guarantee you will gain any insight into that particular person. All the moreso in a modern society where people are increasingly diverse in their views and lifestyles.
If history teaches us to avoid past follies then our politicians and economists must be completely ignorant of history.
So you think we’ll develop the historical equivalent of a “theory of everything”?
.
That’s not what I said. Onceupon a time history consisted of a list of English Kings. As the scale gets bigger so does the history.
It is completely impractical to expect most people to sufficiently examine other cultures so as to become adequately informed about the same.
Nonsense.
Understanding a person’s culture is no guarantee you will gain any insight into that particular person.
Did I offer any such guarantees?
If history teaches us to avoid past follies then our politicians and economists must be completely ignorant of history.
Um yeah.
Adrien
I agree with John H. You are placing a burden of social engineer that is far too great for school lessons to bear, and very unfair on teachers to boot.
It is highly debatable that school history lessons can provide any guide whatsoever to safe-guarding the future.
The best way for indigenous (ie. locally-born) school children and immigrants to integrate and co-exist productively is to get in amongst each other. Firstly, at school age, an immigrant child’s place of birth very often is soon forgotten, or at least increasingly seen as a burden by the kid, who like every other kid who ever lived, just wants to fit in where s/he is actually living now!
Secondly, I pity the poor Korean or Sudanese kid, who is periodically identified in class, by the teacher saying ‘and today class, we are going to learn to respect and appreciate the deep, ancient, and very interesting culture that little Wan and Chiluba come from…’
At the moment, we have decided to send the kids to the local public schools, and with the money saved, give them a REAL education about human diversity by actually traveling overseas. If the government were truly serious about ‘global harmony through the class room’ it would be far more effective to transfer funds away from the classroom to paying for every single Australian school student to go on school excursions overseas every couple of years or so. Maybe even get them to write an excursion report, complete with video, and post it to their Facebook page!
The best way for indigenous (ie. locally-born) school children and immigrants to integrate and co-exist productively is to get in amongst each other
Good point. I have a vague recollection of studies pointing to exactly this effect. Can’t find that but did find this:
http://library.adoption.com/articles/young-children-and-racism.html
Many educators and psychologists have developed programs to address racism. Beverly Tatum and Phyllis Brown, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, have developed a program that brings a group of racially mixed children in elementary school together after school hours for a period of seven weeks. In the early weeks of the program, children are grouped by race to discuss their own identity issues. Part way through the program, children are reassigned to a racially mixed group, and discussions about racial issues continue. Parent groups meet once a month to discuss racism and learn how they can discuss racism with their children. This approach, bringing children together in small groups to work together on a specific task, is commonly known as cooperative learning. Howard Fishbein believes that this approach may be one of the best ways to help children offset their prejudices toward classmates of other races. Children come to see themselves as teammates, as “insiders” rather than “outsiders.” They learn to encourage each other’s participation, to listen to each other’s ideas, and to disagree with respect instead of derision. Fishbein suggests the widespread use of this strategy may produce a generation of children who grow to adulthood actively seeking commonalities across culture and race, rather than differences (Sleek, 1997). Observations of kindergarten classrooms in which the children were from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds found no episodes of interracial or intraracial tension (Holmes, 1995).
I seem to recall (and John H you may be able to dig up the relevant study) that in some cases extensive historical knowledge can actually be counter-productive when it comes to people living harmoniously, especially where there has been good and bad behaviour on all sides.
IIRC this study was conducted with respect to people from the Balkans, so may not be reproduceable, but it strikes me as plausible, at least in an area of the world where everyone is busily nursing their historic grievances.
I seem to recall (and John H you may be able to dig up the relevant study) that in some cases extensive historical knowledge can actually be counter-productive when it comes to people living harmoniously, especially where there has been good and bad behaviour on all sides.
I know with certainty that I have not read such a text but it is a fascinating idea. One of those concepts that as soon as you’re introduced to it you wonder why you didn’t realise it before. You don’t have to be a Freud to work out the psychodynamics of that one. Take one one-eyed scholar with influences who keeps proclaiming, “them, over there, they did us over and we tried to be good but they kept doing it. ” And off we go … .
I’ll have a dig around, see what comes up.
BTW Adrien, I am most certainly not saying that we shouldn’t study history and culture. It is entertaining and instructive. I was merely pointing out that the reasons given are not necessarily good reasons. Damn it man, if we enjoy reading about stuff it doesn’t have to have some immediate utility. As an old friend once said to me: John, you’re a cognitive hedonist.
BTW, I just finished my take on Foucault’s History of Madness. I am not kind. Who? Me? Vicious?
http://healthycuriousity.blogspot.com/2010/03/history-of-madness-michel-foucault.html
Peter – You are placing a burden of social engineer that is far too great for school lessons to bear, and very unfair on teachers to boot.
You misunderstand what I’m saying, or actually why I’m saying it. I am not advocating global historical perspective as some kind of mulitculti panacea. I am advocating it as contemporary history. As what it known.
I don’t think that history should be taught to make someone whose just in from, say, Venezuala feel good about themselves. In the stream of history some political/cultural centres are significant, most are peripheral. Australian history, for example, is only of interest to us. Whereas American history is of interest to everyone.
This is not an anti-Western diatribe it’s simply about what we know. Thing is, as John Stuart Mill said, Westerners have history whereas the Chinese have customs. What does that mean? Western history is more interesting because we’re egotiostical and disobey our parents. The Chinese don’t. So there nothing ever changes.
Western chauvinists who fear the teaching of non-Western history as a threat should have more confidence in themselves. Western history will continue to take centre stage because it’s more interesting.
In utilitarian terms also it’s not about harmony necessarily. It’s also about weaponry.
I seem to recall (and John H you may be able to dig up the relevant study) that in some cases extensive historical knowledge can actually be counter-productive when it comes to people living harmoniously, especially where there has been good and bad behaviour on all sides.
The Babel Fish effect?
Well Krillard really are consulting widely and listening to the people. The Dreamtime has been given the boot from the Science curriculum.
ABORIGINAL Dreamtime stories will be removed from the national science course on the orders of curriculum head Barry McGaw, who said religious and spiritual beliefs had no place in the science classroom.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/dreamtime-spiritual-so-off-science-courses/story-e6frg6nf-1225836724718
I see John Greenfield – *cough* – is back (aka Peter Patton)
Love the discussion. A few points.
(1) The reason to have state schools is to control the belief sets offered to children. That is why (pdf) the main competing provider of schools to the state are religious bodies.
(2) It is not to improve the quality of schooling (it would be much better to have a regulator who is not compromised by also being a provider) as the choices of very poor parents are nicely demonstrating. This is particularly an issue for primary schools, as they are particularly insulated from the consequences of whether they succeed or fail as teaching institutions.
(3) It is certainly not to provide equality of schooling, since (given a single model), school catchment areas and quality of principal makes a huge difference.
So, if it is all about belief sets, what are the purposes of the people setting the required belief sets? (I.e. curricula). Are they people intimately involved in running businesses, making this work, putting up with the consequences of what they do?
Not so much.
Or are they more likely to be engaged in status games that reward themselves for their conspicuous virtue (including conspicuous inclusiveness)? How much does the content of what is set as curricula (and taught) make sense as displays of conspicuous virtue?
Follow the incentives.
Babel Fish, yes; IIRC it had caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the known universe.
SL @11 My rule of thumb for first discovery/invention is
If invented before 500BC it was invented in the Fertile Crescent
If it was invented between 500BC and 1500AD it was invented in China
If it was invented after 1500, it was invented in the West.
Except for anything to do with horses, in which case it was invented in Central Asia.
The Europeans do get the Archimedean screw, distilling and the camshaft/gearshaft before 1500. The Indians get (the discovery of) zero.
Lorenzo, that is a very handy metric, although I do wonder about the Mesoamerican civilisations; apparently they were first to zero. I suppose in that case they didn’t have anyone to share it with.
[I mention this because I've just watched Apocalypto, which I found both disturbing and interesting in the way it presented what was clearly an advanced civilisation--ie, they knew what an eclipse was and how to predict one--that was also barbaric to the nth degree].
The Mesoamerican civilisations had to do it all on their own, so don’t count
It is strictly a Eurasian metric.
And Apocalypto is disturbing in precisely the way you say. I was particularly struck by the way Gibson got us into the forest-dwellers’ point of view, so that the city civilisation seemed alien and strange even while we understood its basic structure.
What is interesting is that they clearly weren’t carrying out all those human sacrifices to make sure the sun came up or whatever; it was almost as though they were doing it because they could. Very strange. The audience reactions (I’m not sure how historical) were also very creepy.
SL. Actually the clue – and I argue key to the entire film – is that these sacrifices were taking place just as a solar eclipse was taking place.
Now, it is only because I knew a bit about ancient cosmologies and science that I picked this up. Maybe you might remember, that during the scene when the captives are taken to the top of the pyramid, and their hearts yanked out, suddenly the sky starts to darken, and the masses go nuts with fear. Why?
1. Mayan cosmology was based on a balance between the energy from the sun and the energy released from human hearts raised to the sun. Where does the latter come from? Human sacrifices.
2. If you were watching closely, the sacrificing priest and the king exchange a brief smile in a “nudge, nudge” conspiratorial way. Why? Because the priest was part of the Mayan elite educated in astronomy. Their calendar could accurately predict most astronomical events, including solar eclipses. So both king and priest knew that because the earth and the moon would continue on their revolutions, the sun would re-appear in a few minutes. When it did, the masses go bonkers with joy. Then the priest declares something like ‘OK, we can spare the rest of the captives, as the sun god has had enough hearts to continue to supply us with energy for a while.’
The big takeaway from this scene is that the king and the priest’s authority is affirmed as they are credited with bringing the sun back. That particular exchange of smirks signals the political corruption that was at the centre of a civilization on the verge of collapse.
I think Gibson was trying to say to us “look out guys, coz despite having great military might and scientific knowledge, your civilization might be collapsing.”
The significance of the final scene when we see the [Spanish] ships is also Gibson signalling, “hey, all you Injuns and fuzzie-wuzzies, don’t blame the white-man for your society’s travails. You did it yourself, before the white man even arrived.”
I think it’s one of the best films I have ever seen.
Oh I got that part, Peter (see comment # 73). They clearly knew what an eclipse was and how to predict one (or the educated people did, anyway). It was a classic case of putting scientific knowledge to work in the service of religion.
Mind you, the Europeans are portrayed as threatening, too — and, significantly, the protag and his wife take a very measured decision between them to run (not that it would have done them much good, with all the diseases about to be introduced).
It’s a much better film than the Passion, that’s for sure. It’s almost as though he took the training wheels off for Apocalypto.
SL. Yes. Oh I certainly didn’t mean that Gibson was pro-Spanish. Again, there is a vital clue. As jaguar Paw and his tribespeoples are being dragged off by the Mayan/Aztecs (the film does – deliberately – conflate the two for dramatic effect and historical integrity) to be sacrificed/enslaved, they encounter a really weird girl who mumbles a curse/prophecy at them. I can’t remember it all, but basically she predicts everything that follows.
But it goes something like ‘those of you vile imperialists who are being baddies now will be killed by one of these captives – the jaguar – who in turn will lead his people to other vile imperialists who will devastate them.’
The final part of the girl’s prophecy is therefore when Jaguar Paw leads them to the coastline. When he sees the Spanish, all the girl’s prophecies come back to him. His look is ‘shit, I’m the jaguar, and I have lead to my own people to those who will destroy us.’
Er, that should be ‘lead the vile imperialists to those other vile imperialists who will destroy them,’ not Jaguar Paws own people who were fertilizer ages ago.
It really is a brilliant ending, escape with a bitter twist. Mel is a bit fixated with paradise lost and serpents in the garden but it was just brilliantly filmed and the story so compelling. That last scene is a bit of a litmus test for how fair reviewers are about Gibson, I saw quite a few that read that scene as a straight racist “here come the white saviours.” It takes a particularly rigid mind to come up with that interpretation.
I can’t stand Mel Gibson, but I did enjoy Apocalypto. I thought it was great.
If you get the DVD of Apocalypto, watch the special features. You get a real sense of how Gibson got those novice actors to give great performances.
And also how come the guy who plays the villain is so astonishingly fit for a man in his 50s? Looks like Tarzan, talks like Jane.
BTW It is clear in the film that the diseases are already ashore. The implication being that it was the expedition to the Mayans, not the Aztecs, we are seeing coming ashore at the end (which is a brilliant ending).
The one bit that bothered me was the pile of post-sacrifice corpses. Effective shocking cinematography but bad history: the sacrifices were eaten. Elite access to all that extra protein was part of the value of the sacrifices in the first place. (As was normal also with animal sacrifices.)
Lorenzo, I wouldn’t get too hung up on mel’s historical attribution of particular human sacrifice rituals, ideology, and politics. He definitely conflates 9th century Mayans and 15th century Aztecs on that score. But would anybody with an IQ above 17 watch the film as a documentary made for the History Channel?
Lorenzo – really?! Goodness gracious – how repulsive. The human sacrifice bit was horrific enough.
I suspect he just couldn’t stick cannibalism in there. That would have tipped the film over into some weird hybrid of splatter and camp and, yeah, well I don’t think it would have worked.
Gah.
SL. Oh but the Aztecs were absolutely over the top with their human sacrifice fetish. But hey, humans, even ones living in civilizations aren’t necessarily all that nice, or smart, which was the main takeaway from my viewing of the film.
PP@83 Yes, Mel does some conflating, though Mayans did do human sacrifices. It was just my mind went “great horrific cinematography but they would not have wasted all that protein”.
LE @84 Afraid so. It was a bit of a shock for me when I read Marvin Harris’ discussion of it in Our Kind. But he makes the excellent point that Aztecs (and Mayans) were protein-short societies. Particularly the Aztecs: they used to harvest beetle eggs as a protein source. As he points out, a society which harvests pond scum is not going to pass up all that good eating flesh.
For an example of the nasty effects of protein shortage, look into how Maori society changed after they ate the last Moa. (Hint: they went from large, unfortified villages to small, heavily fortified ones.)
SL @85 Agreed, as cinema, it was the right decision. Which, alas, is how ignorance entrenches ignorance.