West Metro Critical Thinking club

SPEAKER: Professor P Z Myers, Associate Professor of Biology, University of Minnesota, Morris, Minnesota. Also founder and author of the Science Blog Pharyngula http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ hosted on both the Science Blogs and Freethought Blogs networks. He currently works with zebrafish in the field of evolutionary developmental biology and cultivates an interest in cephalods. He is an outspoken critic of intelligent design (ID) and the creationist movement, and is active in the American creation–evolution controversy. He is widely regarded as a confrontationalist. In 2006, the science magazine / journal Nature listed his Pharyngula as the top-ranked blog by a scientist based on popularity.

TOPIC: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and the Liberal Arts: How do we teach science?

There is a constant push to change education from an experience that broadens the mind to one that focuses students on a vocation. We've got universities hiring business people with no educational experience to make them more profitable, and people seriously questioning the value of disciplines like philosophy, psychology, sociology, or anything that others disparagingly call "soft" subjects. At the same time, there are advocates of reform who think algebra is useless, and that we waste too much time teaching mathematics that, they think, no one will ever use.

P Z will be presenting an interdisciplinary, liberal arts perspective on science education -- we need all facets of human knowledge if we are to adequately comprehend our own narrower fields of interest. I'll be interested in getting a discussion going about what attendees expect from a college education.