Should colleges mandate all students take a general course about climate, food, and energy?

Taking courses and learning lessons are very different undertakings. You can sent a lot of students to courses and the only thing that has been learned is how to pass the course test.

What I would very much like to see is for high school students in micro-internships at power plants, sewage treatment plants, landfill operations, big agricultural operations, etc. This would be very hard to do right, but the payoff would be an understanding of how the real world works. Lessons would be learned that can never come from a classroom.

 

Slow Food is gaining in all areas (Eurasia & North America) as people express dissatisfaction with industrial agriculture and seek quality over quantity and better taste and health. We are now at greater than 7 billion people where food will increase in price while decreasing in quantity. People are rediscovery personal agriculture and the community connections it makes.

 

Very interesting thread now. We might step back to a higher level of generality than was originally proposed:

Have the fundamental requirements for an adequate higher education changed in the last 50 years or so? During that time human population has increased a lot, as has reliance on fossil fuel energy systems. and reliance on mechanized (fertilized) agriculture.

Here it has been suggested that physics, thermodynamics, and agriculture are among areas that could be in need of a revamping. That all sounds good to me. I took an undergraduate elective course in chemical engineering. It was extremely well-taught and the fundamentals have been of use to me ever since. Even though I an not a chemical engineer.

Perhaps the question is, what does everybody (at the college level) need to know in today's world? It is easy to argue that this world is fundamentally different from 100 or 150 years ago.

One earlier suggestion I would not want to follow relates to the uselessness of calculus (for a broad swath of people). I'd readily agree that it is often poorly taught. But dang, one's world completely changes when one realizes the real meaning of integration and differentiation. If your world did not change, I am sorry and I do blame your educators.

So, why not decide on appropriate curricula for the present and future? One caveat though. I was years ago, involved in just such planning in faculty meetings at the University of Puerto Rico. Lots of good ideas; it sucked up a great deal of time among the faculty that though it was important to do (including me). In the end, nothing changed at that university. The meetings produced only CO2 as product.

So, change may be very well recognized as a good thing. Doesn't mean that change will happen.

Meanwhile the energy systems, agricultural systems, and yes even climate systems change. They don't depend on human intentions (at least in colleges). They do depend on physics, thermodynamics, and natural-resource distribution and availability. Yes, I do think that even rank and file citizens would do well to be better informed on such fundamentals.

Last, for skruse and peak everything. Phosphorus is back in the news (at least in the news I read). The whopping majority of it is in Morocco. Who knew? So the forward-thinking agriculturalist might want to invest in some land (known in the mining business as overburden) there. You can bet a yuan that one large Asian country is thinking about it

 

No argument if its just the facts, nothing but the facts. If it gets into policy or opinion or politics, that can be OK too if handled openly. We'd have to prepare the curriculum, but I was envisioning some potential issues....

e.g., climate change is a debate is because we have to extrapolate from the facts to develop hypotheses about what might happen, and what we may or may not need to do about it.

 

I'm sure you agree with me that a nursing major should not be required to learn farming to graduate college.

If you are arguing that most americans are involved with growing most of their own food the usda says its less than 2%. I don't think we need to teach kids to milk cows. Some would even say keeping the cows or using the milk is bad, but that is quite a different discussion.

Extension
There are agrarian countries but worldwide the figure has dropped to less than 1/3 of the population involved with food production.

In my reply to you I did say that kids in k-12 should learn where food comes from and issues of sustatinability. You may just be agreeing with me.

I did have to look up what slow food.

I don't think we are running out of food in the US. We have so much that we mandate to burn some in our cars. Compared to 60 years ago, we have changed from not getting enough calories, to eating too much and exercising too little.

If you are arguing the world is running out of food, this has been said since malthus. Every time the people arguing that this time we really are running out have been proven wrong. FAO shows that per capita world food production has been increasing not decreasing. Its an interesting point to discuss in a high school class. It is certainly not a scientific fact that food will be more scarce in the future.

 

I'll have to disagree with you about the "non-partisan" part. In college I was taught only one kind of economics. I believe one of the current Nobel Prize winners was initally ostrasized for his proposals in physics. Just look at the Darwinism vs. Creationism battles going on in schools.

Yes, knowlege in its purist form, i.e., facts, is indisputable, but in today's era of mass communications, almost every subject is under attack from those who esouse other theories who claim those are new facts. So, how could a class on subjects the OP wants be taught objectively?

 

CREATIONISM IS NOT SCIENCE!

Icarus

 

A better question: how can anything be taught when general literacy and reasoning is so poor ?

 

A better question: how can anything be taught when general literacy and reasoning is so poor ? When most of the populace cannot distinguish opinion from fact?

 

Dupe post.

 

I think you made your point Sagebrush.

An argument could be made that some "facts" are only theories, thereby subject to interpretation. The problem is just as we generally accept a theory as fact, someone will come along and challenge it with new data; e.g.,: "chocolate is not good for you," and just last week new evidence has shown chocolate has redeming values.

My whole point was the mandatory classes the OP was talking about could be open to interpretation, thus ineffective.

 

Try telling that to a Fundamentalist operated College!

 

And how many of those debates were solved by grade schoolers?

That you were taught one kind of economics is a failure on the part of your school. I was taught multiple sides of many issues, so it can be done.

That Noble winners initially receive skepticism is absolutely correct. Any new idea should be required to fight hard for a position of approval. If the idea was obvious it doesn't deserve a Nobel prize.

There is no reason Darwinism vs Creationism debate should be in the schools. Darwinism is a scientific theory; Creationism is a religious doctrine. One belongs in the science classroom, one in the religion classroom. But even if you want to teach Darwinian vs. Lamarkian evolution, we should not be debating which gets taught in the classroom. What should be taught is what is known, what is unknown, and ideas about how to move the latter into the former.

The Darwinian vs Lamarkian debate is a great example of how political ideology got in the way of scientific progress. Having every subject taught, suffer from the same problem would be a catastrophe.

 

Given strict scientific definitions, no theory should ever be accepted a fact. They aren't different confidence levels in a piece of knowledge. A fact is an observation of some sort. A theory is an testable explanation for a bunch of facts. Nothing will ever turn a theory into a fact, just increase our confidence in it. The trouble is non-scientific definitions equate theories with facts with low confidence levels.

"Chocolate is not good for you" isn't a fact or a theory. It is a value judgement. "Chocolate contains endorphins" is a fact. "Chocolate might cause mood swings in this patient with a certain condition due to the endorphins it contains" is a theory. ["chocolate has redeeming values." isn't even contradictory evidence.]

Note that both theories and facts can be repudiated. Perhaps chocolate doesn't contain endorphins. And our confidence in facts can be lower than our confidence in theories (xref. the thread on faster than light neutrinos).

Also, just because something is a theory does not mean that it is open to interpretation. Relativity predicted that the sun would bend star light which would be observable at eclipses. No interpretation; either it did or it didn't (turns out it did).

 

I want a nurse that understands food, even if you don't. I hope you don't get any food related illnesses (which, by the way, is the vast majority).

 

I'll take it very slowly, since my words seem to be twisted in some bizarre way.

Universities are quite capable of providing curiculum without federal mandates for all students. These mandates would seem onerous.

As an example I will use nursing. You can pick a school, but I'll use the local one here that I recieved my graduate degree from and have influence on curiculum (but not in nursing). UT follows the AACN guidelines. Here are the requirements

School of Nursing | The University of Texas at Austin | Prospective Students

Notice that no farming is included. In texas there is not a shortage of people that understand farming, but we do have a shortage of nurses. Related to food we have

Biology, Chemistry, and statistics
which are important to understand as a basis of
nutrition.

Nutrition covers organic and free range issues, processed foods, vegetarianism, meditaranian diet, food paramid versus the plate, fad diets, etc. It will even cover polyphenols in chocalate as they relate to reduction in risk for heart disease. As well as sugar, corn sweateners, etc. In other words the nursing students will learn far more about food as it relates to health than any mandatory "food" requirment for the general student population.

In upper division course work they do study food born chemicals, viruses and bacteria. As for getting food born illnesses, I have had food poisoning, but it was diagnosed by my doctor not a nurse. For a PA or medical degree there are higher requirements.

At the texas degree program you will notice that spanish for health care is required. The school believes it is important to give care to all people whether they can speak english or not, and the majority of non-english speakers are spanish. Students here can satisfy the signature requirement with sustainability, but they are free to take a course that interests them more.

Please understand, I am not saying farming is not important. I am saying that kids can learn about it before college and there are more important things to know about in most of our lives and careers.

 

While mostly true, theories like the cellular theory or life or the atomic theory of matter are going to really hard to not accept as "facts". Certainly the atomic theory of matter does not hold in neutron stars or black holes. Nothing in the cell theory of life requires "living" organisms to be made out of cells.

My point here is that at some point the battle over fact/opinion transitions to a battle over definitions. Specifically the atomic theory of matter has now morphed into theories of where it does and does not apply. The cellular theory of life is now a battle over definitions of "Cell" and "Life" not that life might or might not be made of cells.

As may parting thought, there use to be a theory about solar systems outside of ours. Is this theory really outside of becoming a fact?

 

You said farming. The thread title talks about food.

Since your nurse IS being taught about food, I am not sure what you are complaining about. I am also pretty sure it is mandatory.

 

They aren't the same KIND of knowledge. NO amount of confidence turns a theory into a fact. Nor is a fact necessarily MORE certain than a theory.

Take the recent issue with faster than light neutrinos. http://priuschat.com/forums/freds-house-pancakes/98237-faster-than-light.html This is a classic case of a theory butting up against a fact. The theory is relativity, the fact is that those neutrinos appeared to cover a known distance faster than light could (in a vacuum). No one on the CERN team had more confidence in the fact than they did in the theory. They thought there was the merest chance that the theory might be wrong, and a huge chance that the facts were.

 

SageBrush, I shouldn't complain if literacy and reasoning were included in 'curriculum reform'. The need for those are things that have not changed in the last 5 decades. Thus they are different from the things I suggested.

Seems to me that grad school is about the time when L&R are generally addressed. Better late than never.