Potions Prologue

Since I set myself the goal (in my most recent blog post) of starting a draft to the introduction of my Potions textbook by the end of the week, I was sufficiently motivated to put something together. So without further ado, here’s a draft of what may be the Prologue to the book.

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You may be wondering why Potions is a core subject in a school of magic. Isn’t Potions just similar to the Muggle study of Chemistry? Shouldn’t learning how to cast spells be sufficient to cover the needs of any young wizard or witch? Why should I learn Potions?

These are excellent questions.

While Potions shares many similarities to Chemistry, it also includes the use of magical ingredients in addition to the “natural” ingredients used by Muggles. Furthermore, the use of potions has proved significantly more efficacious when used to change the internal structures of living things. Casting a healing spell may “fix” the superficial external parts of an injury, but living beings are very complex internally. Healing the internal parts that we cannot observe with the naked eye is very difficult. Without a detailed understanding of the tiny world of atoms and molecules, a spell could easily go awry and cause even more damage. That is why Potions are prevalent in the Healing Arts.

Think about what you need to cast a successful magic spell. Remember that magic is the manipulation of matter and energy, powered by your wand and your mental focus. While the wand is the instrument used to channel and direct the energy, it is your mental focus and imagination that initiates or creates the spell. The incantation helps to focus the spell’s action, but it need not be verbally spoken. Similarly, moving your wand using particular hand actions helps to focus the action, but the source of working the spell is your concentration and ability to visualize what you want the spell to do.

If you wanted to move an object with the Locomotor spell, you need to fix your mind on the object’s movement as you cast the spell. If you cannot imagine the object’s movement in your mind, your spell will fail even if you utter the correct incantation and flick your wand in the right direction. When you cast Aguamenti you are drawing unseen water vapor from your surroundings and condensing it in a particular location. You don’t need to understand the molecular structure of water to be successful – the imagining of liquid water, which you are very familiar with, appearing in a particular location, is all that you need to do in your mind. On the other hand, creating water in a parched environment is much more challenging and requires advanced magical understanding.

Apparition is dangerous if you are not familiar with your destination because your imagination may transport you to a different location that “looks” similar to what you held in your mind’s eye. And if that location is too far away, it may draw far too much energy to move your own weight in the blink of an eye. Remember that the energy required to magically move objects is still dependent on the mass of the object, the distance moved, and the time taken. (Muggles study this in Physics.) You may deplete your own energy with very serious consequences.

True Transfiguration is particularly challenging. What you have learned at an introductory level is to reshape the transfigured object so that it externally resembles a different object. But this transformation is only temporary because most spellcasters only imagine the externality of the object that is seen, while paying little attention to the unseen internal parts that may be crucial to sustaining the object’s long-term structure or behavior. The more complex the objects, the more difficult the transfiguration, and the effects are often only temporary. If the internal structure is not also appropriately transfigured, after some time the object will likely revert back to its original structure, deform in some other way or fall apart to dust.

The Polyjuice Potion is now well-known due to recent events in the magical world. Preparation and use of this potion outside of class is strictly prohibited. You should have no reason to impersonate someone else. However, the Polyjuice Potion illustrates an important point. You could cast a transfiguration spell on yourself to change your appearance to mimic another, but it is highly unlikely you will get all the details exactly right. Without the right bone and muscular structure, you are likely to walk and move differently. You would not have the same smell, nor would you sound like the one you are impersonating. It is almost impossible to mimic both the internal and external, without a solid understanding of the particularities of the unseen internal structure. Thus, Polyjuice Potion is more effective, but its effects are still temporary in the current published formulation.

The study of Potions is not just about mixing different substances together in your cauldron for a whiz and a bang. Potions is a subtle Art. A student who masters not just the techniques for preparing potions, but strives to understand the Theory of Potions, will lay a foundation for casting spells of great power. Understanding the internal workings of Chemistry, and being able to imagine the movement and structures of the building blocks of matter (atoms and molecules), will yield magic most powerful – one that knits together internal and external structures into a unified whole. With a thorough understanding of Chemistry you could cast a spell to create water even in the most parched environment.

While Muggles do not possess magic, their study of the Sciences has allowed them to manipulate matter and energy creatively and powerfully. If only our magic did not interfere with the workings of Muggle electricity, we would be able to take advantage of their numerous creations. But if we learned their Chemistry, we could not only rival their creations but surpass them. The “technology” of the Muggles has made them lazy. So-called “machines” do their work and even thinking for them. We, however, will learn Chemistry to strengthen the creativity of our minds and allow us to focus our mental energy and power to work the most sublime magic.

While you may find the potion recipes of greatest interest initially, I urge you to persevere through the Theory parts of this book. Therein lies the secret to powerful magic. Anyone can read and follow a recipe, but those who wish to tread the path of greatness must understand the fundamental secrets behind the mixtures of different substances – the essence of Potions.

Spring Reflections

Spring Break is a good point to reflect on the semester thus far, and what changes I would like to make in the second half.

My second semester General Chemistry honors class is going very well (in my opinion)! On average the students did great on the first exam. While I would like to attribute it to my teaching prowess, more likely this group is simply a strong class. There is plenty of class participation and question-asking from the students without my prompting. After four solid weeks for thermodynamics, we started on a unit covering liquids, vapor pressure and solutions. There’s still a strong thermodynamic slant to the explanatory arguments, but I’ve also managed to weave in more origin-of-life research into the present unit.

Students started out reading the original 1953 Miller experiment paper, calculating substance quantities of in the reaction mixture, and considering the oxidation states of various reactants and products. I’ve used this exercise before, although I modify it slightly every year to streamline the questions. This time around I added a follow-up homework set that incorporated Henry’s Law to estimate substance solubilities in a reducing versus a neutral atmosphere and why Strecker intermediates might be favorable in the reaction. I tried to prompt the students to make use of other things they have learned without explicitly saying so. After the calculation questions, my two last two (more open-ended) questions were:

·      If instead of the reducing atmosphere, the main sources of carbon and nitrogen are CO₂ and N₂, suggest why might it be difficult to form glycine?

·       In a Urey-Miller atmosphere, the suggested reaction mechanism involves the formation of CH₂O and HCN from the reactants prior to forming glycine. Suggest reasons why this might make sense.

Some of the student responses were quite thoughtful, weaving in oxidation state considerations, bond energies, thermodynamic arguments, molecular polarity, and solubility issues.

In this unit, I spend a few minutes at the beginning of each class walking them through the follow-up experiments and discoveries with Urey-Miller-type syntheses. We talked about how different “atmospheres” synthesize different amino acids, the problem of racemic mixtures, and relevant compounds found in the Murchison meteorite. In the midst of discussing colligative properties with the students, I was able to bring up the 27-year old serendipitous NH₄CN “deep freeze” experiment, which the students found fascinating (judging from the rapt attention I was getting). When the students return from Spring Break, we will be discussing a paper on primitive cell membranes. (I assigned Spring Break reading along with discussion questions!)

My non-majors class started well, but it feels bogged down somewhat in the last couple of weeks. I think I might have been too ambitious in how much material I was trying to “cover” in the first half of the semester. While the students did marginally better on the first exam than the previous year, there were still some significant basic conceptual gaps in understanding. I think I need to do a few more formative assessment exercises. We did a couple in class the week before the exam, essentially having students critique some of the answers they submitted in earlier quizzes. (I pick 4-5 representative answers that may range from having minor flaws to major ones. The students discuss them in small groups, and then I call on students to present and we have a larger class discussion.) Yesterday, I prepared another set for my Monday class next week.

I also need to get started on the Potions project portion of the class. I told the students not to worry about it in the first half of the semester and to focus on learning chemistry basics. But now that we are moving into the second half, I need to start providing some direction. I have made no progress in my potions “textbook”, so my goal this week is to write an introductory section. Maybe I should commit to having part of it in my next blog post later this week. Hopefully that motivates me to get it done! I also need to settle on writing up one example of Potion Design that the students can use as a guide so they know what to expect. Unless I get any other good ideas, I will probably settle on the magical cyanide antidote I had previously considered.

Other than that, I’m taking advantage of the peace and quiet to catch up on research projects, write student recommendation letters and read some origin-of-life papers. All three activities are a pleasure, but they are more productive when one isn’t constantly interrupted, as befits their reflective nature. My research students will also spend some of the time catching up on their projects, but I’m sure they are very glad to also just take a break! I’ve told them I’m around if they have questions, but I’m not going to hound anyone. It is Spring Break after all, and one should take time to be reflective.

The Easiness Effect

Who comes up with journal acronyms? I would not have picked PUS, but there may not be much choice when your journal is aptly titled Public Understanding of Science. In a recent paper (cited in the picture below), the authors tackle the easiness effect based on a study in Germany. With German efficiency, the title of the article tells you exactly what it’s about: “When science becomes too easy: Science popularization inclines laypeople to underrate their dependence on experts”

I recommend reading the entire article in full if you’re interested; I will not do justice to the details as I pick and choose what caught my eye in this blog post. One premise of the study is that experts and non-experts (referred to as laypeople in the article) process incoming scientific information differently. This certainly impacts how one chooses the appropriate pedagogy to teach science at different levels depending on student background. As science educators, we should strive to educate all students regardless of their chosen major/specialty to evaluate scientific claims fairly and critically – this is perhaps even more crucial for students not planning to major in science (or who “hated” science in school).

About the paradoxical position that non-scientists find themselves, the author writes: “[They] frequently have to judge the validity of scientific knowledge claims that are of great relevance for their lives, but they lack the necessary epistemic capabilities to make such judgments adequately. The result is that laypeople have to make use of the division of expertise and consult pertinent others on whose evaluation they can rely. By deferring to experts, laypeople can make indirect use of the specialized knowledge required for adequate validity judgments.” Some words of caution are in order: “[This] does not mean that laypeople should trust others blindly and unconditionally. Individuals should calibrate their trust to avoid misinformation by assessing the expert sources for their pertinence, competence, and benevolence.” Given the times we live in, this advice seems particularly timely. Previously, I had only thought about pertinence and competence, and had not considered benevolence – but I think I understand what the authors are getting at.

The study compares popularized (i.e. simplified) versions of science articles to ones that are more technical, but still relatively readable. All articles were related to health for wider reader interest, and articles of each type were paired up to cover the same specific topical material. All articles chosen had a central message implying a causal linkage, e.g., “eating chilies decreases blood pressure” and “coffee protects against prostate cancer”. Source information was removed so that participants did not know the identity of the publication or the author. None of the participants had advanced training in the health professions. The study assessed a number of variables and I think it was overall well designed, at least in my limited opinion as a non-expert in this type of research. My one beef is that the sample size was rather small, and it would be interesting to see similar larger-scale studies.

The results: Not surprisingly, popularized articles were deemed “easier” to comprehend. Participants also “agreed” more with the conclusions of the popularized version compared to the more technical one. Interestingly, participants did not rate popularized versions as more credible. Earlier studies that had the same effect were cited. The suggested reason for this is that laypeople “distinguish between what they consider to be objectively credible in terms of official science, and what they personally accept as true.” This is an important lesson to those of us who are scientists. Just because I communicate something that is “backed up by good science” and seems so clear and compelling to me, does not mean it will change someone’s mind or prior beliefs. It might, but it might not.

The most interesting result from the study is that “laypeople were more confident about their own claim judgments after reading popularized depictions. [They had] a higher trust in their own judgment based on current knowledge, and conversely, a weaker desire for advice from a more knowledgeable source (italics mine). Interestingly, preference for [this] strategy… after obtaining further content information was not affected by either time of measurement or text genre.” That’s a scary thought. In the age of easily accessible information of varying credibility, a well-placed popular article could do great good or harm. It also makes me wonder whether this phenomenon extends beyond science. When I read any popular article outside my field, does that weaken my desire for advice from a more knowledgeable source? I’d like to think not, but unless I was in “researcher mode” trying to get to the bottom of something, I could well be deceiving myself in a buoy of confidence from having “comprehended” something I read. Worse, expertise in one area sometimes goes to our head and we think that we also know better in other areas. Curse of the Ph.D., perhaps.

The authors speculate that a possible explanation for this strategy is that it “might be considered the socially desirable action. Schools focus on encouraging students to think critically by themselves, neglecting the need to judge which expert to trust and when to defer judgment to experts.” The authors close with a section on “Implications for science communication and education”. They suggest caution and thoughtfulness on the part of those who communicate science “when adapting scientific information for lay readers” and they affirm the importance of continuing to communicate clearly and accessibly. Interestingly, there is research suggesting that “the easiness effect can be mitigated by pointing to the controversial and complex nature of scientific topics,” but only partially.

All this reminds me of those moments when I think I should try to be a little less clear in presenting scientific topics and knowledge in the classroom. The clarity sometimes lead to students deceiving themselves that they understand something that they don’t. (That’s why doing some homework after every class is important!) Make the students work a little harder cognitively to “make it stick”.

The Scent of Information

I’d been thinking about open educational resources (OER) and how students might “learn” from the World Wide Web. In my non-majors chemistry course this semester, I chose not to assign a textbook as part of an OER initiative. Instead I assign reading from a couple of online texts plus a few other resources here and there. But do the students read these resources? My quizzes suggest that many of them do not, or they don’t understand what they’re reading even though I’ve picked what seems to me relatively straightforward information.

My very knowledgeable wife sent me an interesting article about how folks browse the Internet for information. It’s an old article (from 2003), but well-written and insightful. The title is “Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster”. The main concept is information scent. Here’s how the authors describe it: “Users estimate a given hunt’s likely success from the spoor: assessing whether their path exhibits cues related to the desired outcome. Informavores will keep clicking as long as they sense (to mix metaphors) that they're "getting warmer" – the scent must keep getting stronger and stronger, or people give up. Progress must seem rapid enough to be worth the predicted effort required to reach the destination.”

In the early years, when search algorithms were still in their infancy, the vast majority of websites you might come across were not of the highest quality. So once you found one, the best strategy was to stick with it; moving on would likely yield less desirable results. Thus, the rationale behind designing a website to attract readers was to make the sites “sticky” by having the initial scent of good content lead to more good content. Hungry users follow the scent!

However thanks to powerful search engines like Google and its contemporary cousins, the ease of finding “good” websites has increased significantly. The downside is that it leads to information snacking, brief visits where the scent leads a tasty morsel, and then departing to find a different morsel elsewhere. Instead of the all-in-one banquet, the modern “informavore” prefers the progressive tapas dinner across multiple locations. In this case, traveling between locations is at the speed of lightning. This leads to different strategies in website design.

What does this have to do with OER? I’ve been mulling over what a good strategy might be for self-paced learning via OER. Not just superficial learning of a factoid here and there, but deep learning that is coherent and indeed leverages the connectivity of the Internet of today and tomorrow. Does one go immersive in a web-based World-of-Warcraft type system? Or is there some other way to curate from the best but somehow have the user/learner directed in such a way that maximum learning, perhaps even mastery learning, takes place. It needs to be attractive enough so that someone who catches the scent is motivated to keep going. But it’s unclear what indeed is the best scent to incentivize learning.

Thinking about this reminds me that I really need to take some time to ponder the deep structure of chemistry in the context of curriculum design. One thing I’m enjoying with my OER approach is a large degree of freedom in re-organizing the material in a way that I hope promotes the scaffolding of deep structure. While few of the students in my non-majors class will go on to take other chemistry classes at least as college students, but if I can instill enough of a scent, maybe they will pursue learning some more on their own later in life. Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but the small dose of idealism helps keep me going. So far I haven’t made large-scale changes, perhaps from too many years of hewing to a standard curricular approach. But Spring Break is coming up, and I’m motivated to think about this issue more carefully!

(I’ve also been tweaking my science-majors chemistry course, and perhaps that is where it is even more important to implant deep structure.)

Teaching, Research and Scholarship, Part 5

Four weeks ago, a Brookings report caught my eye while I was websurfing. “Are great teachers poor scholars?” by David Figlio and Morton Schapiro focuses this question on their own campus, Northwestern University. Here’s a link to the report. Since the release of the report coincided with my early semester busyness, I didn’t get around to blogging about it. So a month later, here are a summary of the results and my subsequent thoughts.

The authors used two proxies to measure teaching quality: (1) The percentage of students that declared a major in an area after taking a first-quarter course in that same field is the “conversion” rate. The authors refer to this an indicator of inspiration due to the first-quarter instructor. (2) The effect of students’ future grades in subsequent classes in the same major field reflects the longer-term value provided by the first-quarter instructor. The authors refer to this as an indicator of deep learning. The data was crunched for eight cohorts of first-year undergraduates.

Research was measured in two ways: (1) Northwestern annually recognizes and honors a subset of its faculty for “research excellence”. Criteria include being elected into prestigious academic organizations, receiving prestigious fellowships, winning major research awards, and more. (2) The h-index was computed for faculty members scaled to departments since there is a large variation in citation norms across different disciplines.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the two research measures correlated. On the other hand, there is essentially no correlation between the two teaching measures, i.e., an instructor who had inspired many students choose to major in that field may or may not have provided them with deep learning. And those who seem to have provided deeper learning, may or may not show much in the way of inspiration. Without more details and the raw data, the lack of correlation is unclear. Furthermore, whether the teaching proxies are reasonable indicators of inspiration, deep learning, or even teaching effectiveness is questionable. The authors do suggest the possibility that their proxies are ineffective measures, but clearly they think there is something to their results, otherwise it likely would not have been published.

Are these results unique to Northwestern? The participants are only tenured faculty, thereby narrowing the pool to those who are at least successful enough on both fronts to earn tenure. As an R1 institution, the teaching loads at Northwestern are also lower on average. With a heavier teaching load, the time constraints may start to impact quality. If you’re at a liberal arts college, with no graduate students, the time factor is even more acute. You don’t have teaching assistants to help with the grading, although this is balanced by having smaller sections. If you’re a lab scientist, your group’s productivity isn’t going to be as high unless you as the principal investigator put in a substantial amount of time training and working with your undergraduate research students. This is balanced by lower productivity research requirements compared to R1 institutions, at least in terms of quantity, not quality.

The report questions the motivation of the University of California system’s move to security-of-employment lecturers, effectively a tenure-line teaching track. The authors think that “protecting the time of the research faculty” may not be an adequate argument. Perhaps Northwestern has more resources, but from a resource point of view, especially with burgeoning numbers of students flocking to the sciences (at least at the introductory level), adjunctification of faculty is simply going to increase. Providing security-of-employment and retaining top-notch teachers who choose to devote their career to full-time teaching excellence seems to me a good thing.

The authors state that “the reason why most of the top-rated universities in the world are located in the United States is not what goes on in its classrooms; it is the research power of its faculties.” And furthermore, “faculty salaries at research universities are determined primarily by research performance and the reputation that comes with it.” I appreciate the fact that having a diversity of educational institutions in the United States allows serving a diverse population with diverse needs. I chose being at a liberal arts college because while I think research and advancing knowledge for its own sake it is important, research is an excellent activity contributing to the education of college undergraduates. But productivity isn’t the main goal, education is! I think it sad that the marketplace places the R1 star researcher at the top of an academic hierarchy, often allowing such people to negotiate lower teaching loads or avoid introductory undergraduate courses. Not all institutions do these, and perhaps Northwestern falls into that category, but as competition continues to heat up, human beings have only 24 hours per day, some of which needs to be spent sleeping or recuperating. It’s hard to achieve excellence in multiple areas without putting in the time and having the appropriate supporting resources. Something will have to give.

(Links to previous posts on this series: part 4, part 3, part 2, part 1)

No Magical Index?

This month's guest blog post, from a chemist and librarian. Enjoy!

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While on vacation last summer, on a whim, I started re-reading the Harry Potter books. All the Harry Potter books. In 10 days (I think). I know there are other things I could have been doing, but this was certainly very enjoyable.

While reading Book 1, my reflex response to Harry, Ron, and Hermione poring over books in the library to find Nicholas Flamel, was, why don't they just Google him? Okay, yes, I should know better. Electronics don't work in the magical world. But old habits die hard.

Further consideration of this problem made me think about why there is no mention of index system for spells and potions. In Book 2, when the trio wants to make Polyjuice potion, they only know about its existence and where to find it because Snape tells them what book it's in.

This got me to thinking about the days before SciFinder, when we used the never-ending volumes of Chemical Abstracts in print. In our current era of structure and keyword searching, the method seems very archaic. Although time consuming, it was very practical and straightforward. You calculate the chemical formula for the compound of interest. Then you check each 10-year index, looking for any references to your compound of interest. Nomenclature has always been my weak point, so I often had trouble identifying the IUPAC names. It was a slow and laborious process. But it worked!

(Photo source: https://flic.kr/p/8bLry1)

So why is there no similar system of indexing in the magical world? The Half-blood Prince and Luna's mother present evidence that there was experimentation among witches and wizards. Professor Umbridge was adamant about "Ministry-approved methods", all of which imply that there were more magical spells and potions available than what students were taught in school.

I wondered if perhaps there was just a culture of secrecy, and the wizarding world didn't want to share new discoveries. But the Harry Potter wiki lists three scholarly journals mentioned in the HP books: Transfiguration Today, The Practical Potioneer, and Challenges in Charming. Their existence suggests that at least some witches and wizards wanted the world to know what they had accomplished.

Would it be too difficult to create and maintain this kind of an index? Seems unlikely, I mean, even Muggles can do it.

This led me to consider that the creative process involved in discovering new spells and potions is not well developed in the books. Professor Slughorn mentions it briefly in Book 6. On the day that most of Harry's potions class is taking their Apparition tests, Slughorn, speaking of Harry's Euphoria potion: "… you've added just a sprig of peppermint, haven't you? Unorthodox, but what a stroke of inspiration…" In the same class, "[Ernie] had most rashly invented his own potion, which had curdled and formed a kind of purple dumpling at the bottom of his cauldron."

There are many examples of spells and potions gone awry due to poor technique; far fewer instances of improvisation and creating new magic, with the exception of dark magic. Perhaps because of Tom Riddle's foray into new magic was incredibly disastrous for the wizarding community, it seemed safer to stick with what is known and "Ministry-approved".

I still don't have a good answer to why there is no magical index in the wizarding world. Perhaps they didn't want to make it too easy for those inexperienced in magic to inadvertently hurt themselves and others, lest it lead to another "Magic is Might" movement. As Dumbledore says: “Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.”

Robots and the Liberal Arts

Last week, I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the provocative title “How Robots Will Save Liberal Education”. The author, Eboo Patel, is a Rhodes scholar, trained in sociology, and he served on Obama’s advisory council on faith-based neighborhood partnerships. The essay begins with a vignette of the author’s mother trying to persuade him as an undergraduate to major in business for job security reasons. She viewed his intended sociology major as being a luxury, but perhaps not very useful. Twenty years later, it’s clear that Patel has put his training to good use, in an entrepreneurial way no less.

Patel argues that the “hallmarks of a liberal education – building an ethical foundation that values the well-being of others, strengthening the mental muscles that allow you to acquire new knowledge quickly, and developing the skills to apply it effectively in rapidly shifting contexts – are not luxuries but necessities for preparing professionals for the coming transformation of knowledge work to relationship work.” Certainly these are all good outcomes of higher education, but it isn’t clear that they are provided only by a liberal education, and that business and engineering majors, would lack these skills without the appropriate classes, or in particular pedagogical method.

He speculates “that the 15-student seminar discussing Plato’s relevance to contemporary situations [could turn out] to be better preparation for the jobs of the future than working through problem sets alone for a science or engineering class.” He posits that the seminar requires attentiveness to diverse viewpoints, working on a synthesis of multiple viewpoints, constructing and communicating an argument, and iterate through this process to make stronger arguments. “All of the above happens in the space of a few minutes in an actual room with actual people. The problem set can be done in a split second by a computer.”

But careful thinking, iterative processing, and synthesizing information from multiple sources isn’t limited to the philosophy seminar (or other liberal arts courses in the humanities and social sciences). This is what scientists and engineers are trained to do in their education; they might even get more rigorous training. Now as a scientist in a liberal arts setting, I think our science majors potentially get the best of both worlds – while the paucity of science requirements for non-science majors does them a major disservice. While I understand that Patel may highlight a stereotypical distinction to make a point, his pedagogic argument is confused, perhaps because he has less teaching experience in the college classroom. Yes, having students discuss and make supporting arguments is good, but only if they have done the reading and thought about it on their own to some extent and wrestled with it. Only then is the dialectic in the classroom enhancing. And the purpose of a problem set isn’t to solve the problem with a known answer. It requires the students to wrestle with, think about, and provides them with the foundation to then do something else more complicated. It’s a crucial part of the learning process. My students also work in groups and we do have class-wide discussions, but part of the “alone” time working on the problem is key to learning – I’m sure this is true broadly across disciplines and not just in the sciences.

Where I do agree with Patel is that teaching and learning is best in a relational context. They should not be divorced to learning in a disembodied content. This is true not just for human learning, but also from observations of animal learning. (I recently finished Frank De Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals are?) The social aspects may be even more important in the ape culture where technology is more limited, and the relationships are nuanced and complex. Technology allows us to rely less on human relationships to some extent, although it can also enhance relationships across space and time that would have been more difficult to do without writing, movable type, the computer and the internet.

Patel concludes that “robots may well perform medical operations and process our financial transactions in the not-too-distant future, but they are unlikely to replace pastors in pulpits, teachers in classrooms, nurses in hospitals, or coaches on the basketball court.” I’m not so sure, particularly with regard to the notion of place. I think there will still be pastors, teachers, nurses and coaches. But they may not exist in physical or localized pulpits, classrooms, hospitals or gyms. I agree with Patel that “people need interaction with other people to become better people”, and that liberal education, broadly construed, helps. But what if that’s not the goal of the people? The ideal society envisioned by Plato’s philosopher kings may not be shared by its democratic populace. Robots, part of the technological advance, raise particular questions about relationship and identity. Are we increasingly choosing to be Alone Together? And if so, perhaps liberal education is truly in jeopardy.