****But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down -- or hardly going up -- in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress -- lots of theory, but no progress -- in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.****
This is rather pathetic. In the first place, as Miles has been noting over and over again, those scores are _not_ going down. And in the second place, it is sad to see as great a scientist and as sparkling a writer as Feynman not notice that those educational theories really can't be reduced to "Succeed" or "Fail." There are too many other elements involved. School enrollments have been incrasing steadily for 100 years. So the _obvious_ question is what would have happened if the techniques of 1900, teaching the narrow selection of students who continued to high school, had been continued in a society where almost everyone goes to high school.
We do, in fact, have a hell of a lot of knowledge about how to educate. Unfortunately, that is a discipline much more difficult (because so much more complex) than quantum mechanics, so knowing a lot still leaves us needing to know much more.
Carrol