E. O. Wilson’s method of teaching

    In his new little book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, E. O. Wilson distills his success as a teacher of biology into five principles. Copyright law allows us to quote no more than the first. Would that all teachers of all subjects followed it:

Teach top-down. If I learned anything in four decades of experience, it is that the best way to transmit knowledge and stimulate thought is to teach each subject from the general to the specific. Address a large question of the kind already interesting to the students and relevant to their lives, then peel off layers of causation as currently understood, and in growing technical and philosophically disputatious detail, in order to teach and provoke. Explain, for example, aging and death as best can be done with knowledge of evolution, genetics, and physiology, then explore the consequences in demography, public policy, and philosophy. Finally, proceed laterally, if wished, into the consequences of the phenomenon to history, religion, ethics, and the creative arts. Do not teach from the bottom up, with an introduction such as “First, we’ll learn some of this, and some of that, and we’ll combine the knowledge later to build the bigger picture.” Don’t paint the picture in pointillist dabs to easily bored students. Instead, put it up whole as quickly as possible, and show why it matters to them and will matter for a lifetime. Then dissect the whole down to the foundations.

    Besides “Teach top-down,” Wilson’s headings for the four other principles are “Reach outside biology,” “Focus on problem solving,” “Cut deep and travel far,”and “Commit yourself.”

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    For a brief biography of E. O. Wilson, click here.

Comments

[Dave Iverson]

Nice points. Following Wilson's first point, I have long argued that economics must be taught first as welfare economics/political economy to establish proper context. Then one might dabble a bit with macro and micro economics, international finance, etc.

Lately my focus has broadened so that the main frame is ecological economics as a multi-disciplinary conversation about sustainability. But that's another topic for a different blog..