Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
Restructuring the University 163
pushing the boundaries of what is known. Wouldn’t this be a bet-
ter course than Introduction to Physics? The teachers could introduce
whatever aspects of physics they wanted to help students understand
the predictive process in that area, but other faculty who did predic-
tion in other areas would be part of the discussion. There would be a
set of interesting issues ranging from predictions that were thought
to be right but weren't, to predictions that are being made today in
each area. The content would be the predictive process itself, not the
traditional subject matter. Statistics (and other useful tools) would be
taught in this context while the predictive process was being studied.
Modeling. Who build models? Psychologists think about models of
the mind, as do computer scientists and philosophers who specialize
in thinking about thinking. Architects and economists build models
of a different sort. Engineers work with models regularly. All of these
people use different modeling tools but they work on the same thing:
trying to figure out how something works by building it and seeing if
they can replicate it. They may be using a computer or building blocks
or electricity or art. It makes no difference. It is all an attempt to see
how things work by building some facsimile. This is an important idea
in human thinking, and a course should be taught to undergraduates
on how to do it by the people who actually do it, teaching different
techniques as they go. They are many ways to build a model, and
students in college should know the possibilities before they take on
further study.
Experimentation. Psychologists do experiments. Chemists do
experiments. Physicists do experiments. Medical researchers do
experiments. (The drug companies are constantly doing experiments
that affect us all.) Why is there no course in learning how to do an
experiment? Shouldn't students be learning how to come up with a
hypothesis and how to test that hypothesis? Isn’t that more important
as a fundamental building block of the mind than any course offered
to freshmen in college today?
Evaluation. Every academic field does evaluation. In every
discipline there are ways and means to discuss and evaluate the
worth of papers and research and practical proposals. Businesses are
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023909