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Interesting discussion this morning with Wil about a variety of subjects, thought I would post some of them here.

So primitive man must have been doing something right because, well, we're here now and surviving. So what does it mean when we use "primitive" or Caveman logic in our day to day life? Raising our kids in the way we envision cavemen would have?...

Caveman Logic (book), Caveman Logic (site)

[The author, Hank Davis, is a professor of psychology at the University of Guelph in Canada and has a blog here.]

The idea is that we were, and are now, wired to create "narratives," stories that help us survive. Finding "cause" and "effect" was an effective means of survival: fire + hand = ouch; lion + me = big ouch; blue fruit = food, red fruit = stomach cramps. In an article on supernatural science, here, author Robert Roy Britt writes:

"'While it is difficult to know for certain, the tendency to believe in the paranormal appears to be there from the beginning', explained Christopher Bader, a Baylor sociologist and colleague of Mencken. 'What changes is the content of the paranormal. For example, very few people believe in faeries and elves these days. But as belief in faeries faded, other beliefs, such as belief in UFOs, emerged to take their place'.

Figuring out why people are this way is a little trickier.

'It is an artifact of our brain's desire to find cause and effect', Cronk, the psychology professor, said in an email interview. 'That ability to predict the future is what makes humans "smart" but it also has side effects like superstitions [and] belief in the paranormal'."

Humans started believing in the supernatural because the stories they constructed, the sun rising and setting everyday because a god pulled it by chariot across the sky, were just as good as any at the time. Our need to know "why?" is a means for our minds to make sense of the world-- and thereby construct a means of surviving in it. We're natural born storytellers; it's hard-wired into our brains.

So what does that mean for education? Should we guide kids to construct their own narratives in the path of our ancestors? Or should we urge them to deny the hard-wired tendancy for the supernatural? What value does believing in the supernatural have and is it dangerous or "wrong" to believe in it?

Wil spoke of how it all seems to come back to "control," that is, by constructing a narrative (even if it is supernatural or false) gives us a sense of what we can do to avoid misfortune. Control is important to humans, makes us calm, gives us peace-of-mind. If a god pulls the sun across the sky, and the sun makes the crops grow, then by providing offerings for that god, we can gain his favor. We can "control" the sun's behavior in this way, ensuring that it rises and sets every day as it should, despite the fact that we know, now, that nothing we do affects the orbit of the earth around the sun and the rotation of the earth itself.

In the classroom, giving kids the "control" to construct narratives based off of hard evidence, might be an interesting way to go about science and other subjects.