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This is http://www.essayz.com/a8903171.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %TEACH LEARN VALUES SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY PROFESSOR 890317 It is not possible to separate the teaching and learning of science and technology from the teaching and learning of values. Pretending to have succeeded in making such a separation entails the teaching and learning of the value of playing games of mutual self deception. Teaching and learning technical competence involves teaching and learning to value technical competence enough to see it as meriting the spending of enough personal time to acquire the competence. Personal time is a scarce resource. Setting priorities regarding how to spend a scarce resource entails value judgments. Encouraging students to spend major fractions of their personal time acquiring technical skills is teaching them to value those technical skills enough to spend major fractions of their scarcest resource, personal time, upon acquiring the technical skills. To pretend that teaching of values and ideals have been separated from the teaching of science and technology is to participate in a game of mutual self deception; to teach dishonesty. It is far more integrative to be open and honest and to find integrative ways to teach technical competence within the context of open and honest discussions of the relative values of various technical competencies. It is then possible to make informed and wise decisions regarding how to spend personal time in acquiring the technical competencies most likely to have integrative value in real life situations. If professors and students are pretending that values and ideals are not intimately involved in science and technical education, they are not free to honestly discuss the relative merits of learning one set of scientific and technical facts, skills, procedures versus another set. In the absence of such discussion both professors and students are victims of traditions which are divorced from feed-back evidence regarding the consequences of respecting the traditions. They cannot objectively study the consequences of their own reflexive behavior patterns as they pretend to be objective in their professional lives. These considerations are relevant even without attending to traditional questions regarding the social implications of science and technology. Even within the limits of traditional professional activity of scientists and technically trained people not all knowledge and technical skills are of equal value. It is a game of mutual self deception to pretend otherwise and to avoid all discussions of the relative values of different scientific and technical knowledge. People who are compulsively dedicated to being objective at all times can not permit themselves to engage in such discussions of relative values and ideals; for such discussions are essentially reflexive and cannot be objective. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================