Page 150 - Rižnar, Igor, and Klemen Kavčič (ed.). 2017. Connecting Higher Education Institutions with Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 150
Igor Rižnar
timism of preservice and beginning teachers has been a topic of a num-
ber of studies (Weinstein 1980; 1988; Kulik and Mahler 1987; Kearns
1995) and unrealistic performance expectations among low scoring stu-
dents have also been discussed by researchers (Richman 2010), too lit-
tle has been written about the overoptimistic bias of education policy
makers and seasoned teachers.
In this context, examples of framing bias (using a too narrow ap-
proach and description of the situation or issue) and substitution bias
(being prone to substituting a difficult question with a simpler one) can
be easily found in educators and education policy makers.
On Bullshit and on Learning to Write Badly (Industrial Disease)
Today, many professors often have too little incentive to focus on teach-
ing, because if they do not publish they will most likely perish. So
they focus on the production of papers with little genuine insight in
thousands of obscure periodicals that are covering their tiny sub-sub-
discipline almost no one is really interested in.
We live in the world in which, it seems at least occasionally, bullshit
reigns supreme. ‘One of the most salient features of our culture,’ writes
Harry G. Frankfurt (2005), ‘is that there is so much bullshit.’ We are all
aware of it and we all contribute our share to it. But because we take
the situation for granted, very little work has been done on the subject.
According to Frankfurt speech emptied of all informative content ‘is
unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without
knowing what he is talking about’ (p. 63).
Pennycook et al. (2015) focused in their study on pseudo-profound
bullshit, i.e. statements with correct grammatical structure but no dis-
cernible meaning. In my first draft of this paper I was toying with
the idea that a suitable title for it might be ‘From Oprah² to Chopra.’³
Chopra gained an interview on Oprah in 1993 and sold 400,000 copies
of his infamous book (Chopra 1993) which partly explains how bullshit
reproduces. As clearly stated in the conclusion of the 2015 article, bull-
shit sells, Chopra has more than 2.5 million followers on Twitter and has
written more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. It is therefore
high time we started teaching our students ‘real-life’ critical thinking
² Oprah Winfrey, famous for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show.
³ Deepak Chopra, an author famed for his ‘woo-woo nonsense’ (a direct quote from the
Pennycook’s et al. (2015) paper).
148
timism of preservice and beginning teachers has been a topic of a num-
ber of studies (Weinstein 1980; 1988; Kulik and Mahler 1987; Kearns
1995) and unrealistic performance expectations among low scoring stu-
dents have also been discussed by researchers (Richman 2010), too lit-
tle has been written about the overoptimistic bias of education policy
makers and seasoned teachers.
In this context, examples of framing bias (using a too narrow ap-
proach and description of the situation or issue) and substitution bias
(being prone to substituting a difficult question with a simpler one) can
be easily found in educators and education policy makers.
On Bullshit and on Learning to Write Badly (Industrial Disease)
Today, many professors often have too little incentive to focus on teach-
ing, because if they do not publish they will most likely perish. So
they focus on the production of papers with little genuine insight in
thousands of obscure periodicals that are covering their tiny sub-sub-
discipline almost no one is really interested in.
We live in the world in which, it seems at least occasionally, bullshit
reigns supreme. ‘One of the most salient features of our culture,’ writes
Harry G. Frankfurt (2005), ‘is that there is so much bullshit.’ We are all
aware of it and we all contribute our share to it. But because we take
the situation for granted, very little work has been done on the subject.
According to Frankfurt speech emptied of all informative content ‘is
unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without
knowing what he is talking about’ (p. 63).
Pennycook et al. (2015) focused in their study on pseudo-profound
bullshit, i.e. statements with correct grammatical structure but no dis-
cernible meaning. In my first draft of this paper I was toying with
the idea that a suitable title for it might be ‘From Oprah² to Chopra.’³
Chopra gained an interview on Oprah in 1993 and sold 400,000 copies
of his infamous book (Chopra 1993) which partly explains how bullshit
reproduces. As clearly stated in the conclusion of the 2015 article, bull-
shit sells, Chopra has more than 2.5 million followers on Twitter and has
written more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. It is therefore
high time we started teaching our students ‘real-life’ critical thinking
² Oprah Winfrey, famous for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show.
³ Deepak Chopra, an author famed for his ‘woo-woo nonsense’ (a direct quote from the
Pennycook’s et al. (2015) paper).
148
