Pensive the Ludicrous wrote:
If you do happen to have a child in a first grade class that can intuit how ridiculous an argument from ignorance is, you should be praising her,
I'd happily praise her for noticing a fallacious argument, but not for being rude about it to an authority figure
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not undercutting her creative or intellectual development
Ah, so instead, neglect her social development by allowing her to believe it's okay to abandon all manners and disrupt a classroom just because she disagrees with something?
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by telling her to avoid an extremely minor sarcastic remark about her teacher,
Who said anything about avoiding it? If the kid is smart enough to notice the bad argument to begin with, then she's CERTAINLY smart enough to know good and well that there are more appropriate ways to handle the situation. She could have:
1) Said, "Excuse me, teacher, but I don't believe that's true. After all, I can't see your brain, but that doesn't mean it isn't there." (practically the same exact words, just put in a respectful manner that doesn't disrupt the classroom and flaunt rude behavior.)
Furthermore, she could have even mimicked the teacher's argument and turned it to her advantage while STILL. BEING. RESPECTFUL.
Girl: "Teacher, can you hear your breath?"
Teacher: "Yes."
Girl: "Can you feel your heart beating?"
Teacher: "Yes."
Girl: "Can you see your brain?"
Teacher: "No, of course not."
Girl: "But even though we can't
see your brain, clearly we know you have one, because what we
do see are all these other signs that your central nervous system is working. So isn't is possible that because we see the grass and the tree and the sky, we can assume that God is in fact there, because we see all these other things that tell us he's there?"
Ignoring, as the mass email itself did, that there's no way these words ever came out of the mouth of a first grader, of course. Bottom line, had she chosen to confront the teacher herself, she could have done it and made her point without being a disrespectful smart-***.
2) She could have approached the principal, and told him that the teacher was inappropriately delving into issues of philosophy when she was supposed to be teaching (what I presume to be) science and let the principal deal with it
3) (and this is by far the best and most appropriate option) she could have gone home to her parents that night and told them that not only was the teacher dissing on her belief system in class, but also making sh
itty fallacious arguments in the process, and let her parents take it up with the teacher and the school system.
Wow! There are any number of ways in which a well-mannered child could have handled such a thing appropriately.
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when the hypothetical teacher quite frankly deserves a lot more.
What the teacher DESERVES isn't the issue. What is and isn't appropriate behavior for a child in a classroom where some semblance of order must be maintained is.
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I have been arguing that stupid teachers deserve to "own their words" and accept responsibility for the stupid sh*t that they say
I am perfectly willing to get behind that notion. I just don't believe it's the place of a child in the classroom to disrupt the class and behave like a smart-*** in an attempt to make a teacher look foolish in front of the other children when there are more appropriate ways to deal with the situation (such as bringing it to the attention of her parents and letting THEM deal with it.)
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I'd have to try hard to view the article's example as a personal attack
Implying someone is "brainless" isn't a personal attack? [:skeptical:]
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you abstract from that that I want a world free of consequences?
I was building on the other arguments you have made in these forums, wherein you basically want to let everyone skate with a slap on the wrist for just about everything.
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I've told some of my favorite professors in university, and even some really cool ones in highschool, that their conclusions or interpretations of works were "intellectually fraudulent."
And you can't see ANY difference between doing that in a high school or college situation in the presence of older students and doing it in a first-grade classroom where the breakdown of teacher authority resulting from the other children following the example of one precocious smart-*** who takes it upon herself to declare open season on teacher would quickly devolve into a
Lord of the Flies type of situation?
Edit: filter-breaking phail
Edited, Sep 3rd 2009 6:38pm by Ambrya
