A Spring In My Mind

A Spring In My Mind

Spring returned today : sunshine, 16 degrees and boules resumed, which means I can emerge from my last two weeks' hibernation. However, one of the things I started during that hibernation will continue : reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.

I've read only a third so far but the book has already shocked me and given me one important new insight and that is more than I expect of most books. The shock was the assertion, which I take to be true, that the so-called Mind Gym has been adopted by hundreds of UK schools. The insight was to do with placebos.

Adoption of Mind Gym, which is essentially a load of pseudo-scientific nonsense (the target of the book), suggests that the UK educational authorities are simply not up to their job. A cynic might respond: what's new? But I find the scale of incompetence this suggests appalling; it certainly shocked me. I gave up teaching with some reluctance. Being able to show a kid that he could do something he/she thought he/she could never do gave me the biggest of kicks. For me it was a real emotional high (better than sex?). But I felt my own mind was going to rot and needed to do something about that. I had, along the way, formulated the idea that what kids should essentially be taught (academically) was straight and crooked thinking (logic) and sources of information; everything else was perhaps important but peripheral. Given those two tools and the motivation to learn something, I thought and still think kids can potentially learn anything. I never bought into the idea that kids are good at either science or arts; that was a function of the educational system that forced the dichotomy. I remembered at an earlier time a Latin teacher explaining that learning Latin was a good idea because it taught you logical thinking. And I remembered thinking at the same time that if learning logical thinking was a good idea (I thought it was and still do) then why not teach it directly rather than through Latin? (Logic wasn't in the syllabus.)

I also remember my daughter, when she had written a thesis for her degree, refusing my offer to read it through for her on the grounds that I would criticise her grammar, which she knew was weak. It was weak because it wasn't taught in schools in her time. I had had enough discussion with teachers at her secondary school to know that not only was grammar not taught, it couldn't be; the teachers themselves hadn't been taught it and so had nothing to pass on.

These are criticisms of the UK school system but actually teaching hokum as gospel is on another level. Who on earth agreed to this? And, for Heaven's sake, what were their credentials for doing so? Not teaching logic is one thing; actually teaching the opposite is quite another.

On to placebos. I'm familiar with the general idea as are, I am sure, most people. What I had not realised was the power and intricacy of the placebo effect, which the book describes well. It does so as part of an aggressive deconstruction (even destruction) of homeopathy but, incidentally, points to the curative power the placebo effect has. The crux is essentially mind over matter and seems to me to have enormous implications which, unfortunately, the book does not explore. It is not the purpose of the book, I suppose.

Overall, the book illustrates well how the public is being manipulated in the medical arena. I'm sure I won't be alone in hating feeling manipulated in any way and, whilst many of the manipulations discussed are fairly obvious, some are not and have added importantly to my critical toolbox.