I see promotions and advertisements for the Airborne™ “cold remedy” and “immunity booster” all over the place. Why does “Created by a School Teacher!” have so much power with the intended market segment? (Do school teachers get training nowadays in virology, pharmacology, and conducting clinical trials?)
If you’ve not seen the ads or in-store displays, this should help:
To educate the public, it pays to know how people think and make decisions. This one has me baffled.
POSTSCRIPT: And what exactly would “immunity boosting” entail? Would it lead to auto-immune disorders like Multiple Sclerosis? A boosted immune system doesn’t necessarily sound like a good thing to me. (For that matter, could one say that people who suffer from extreme seasonal allergies have “boosted” immune systems?)
I suspect to many non science educated layman their elementary school teacher was a major Authority figure. The adult who had all the answers. Some still see teacher = smart = must be right Enough to help sell the product anyway.
I have found that one really, really odd. Two thoughts:
(1) I have sometimes found that among people with relatively little education, schoolteachers are thought of as being the very smartest people on the planet. Now, I have no desire to disparage schoolteachers, who are a bright (and sometimes brilliant) bunch of people, but it’s fair to say that being a generally smart and well-educated bunch doesn’t really validate one as a creator of medicines.
(2) If your mode of understanding the world is heavily story-based rather than data-based, the idea that someone who is exposed to children’s colds all the time should be perfectly positioned to come up with the perfect cold medicine makes perfect sense.
Your response and @Puck_Mendelssohn’s response brings to mind this classic. I never read it and I don’t hear it mentioned much nowadays but I can see why lessons learned under a kindly kindergarten teacher would be warmly recalled:
In what must have been a sort of preview of my later arguments about the gods, I used to have teacher-infallibility debates with kids in elementary school. Other kids were convinced of the dogma of teacher infallibility. I was not. When teachers made mistakes correcting my papers, I was downright eager to point it out. I had to explain how to compute the area of a triangle to one of them, a teacher who had theoretically just taught us the same thing but who hadn’t understood it correctly.
But the views of other children on teacher infallibility were absolutely unshakeable. They taught me, at an early age, that the ability to reason and to examine things is not a given.
Ah, I never read that one, either. But I have never found books about being nice to others to be all that helpful; they usually just make me want to hit someone.
I find that fascinating because when I was in elementary school I was struck by the fact that school teachers were basically much like every other adult I knew: Some were kind of smart, some were kind of stupid, and most were basically average.
And that used to frustrate me because most of those teachers couldn’t answer various simple and often obvious questions—despite what I knew about them having earned a bachelor’s degree followed by a master’s degree. (My home state had a strict rule requiring all school teachers to get a master’s degree within a set number of years after their original teacher’s license was issued.)
I still remember the non-answers of my second-grade teacher when I asked questions like these:
"Why are the letters ‘gh’ in through silent while the ‘gh’ in laugh sounds like an f-sound and the ‘gh’ in ghost sounds like a simple g-sound?
“Why is the letter q almost always followed by a letter u?”
“Why is the girl’s name Gwen/Gwyneth the only instance I ever see of the letter combination gw?”
My teacher (who always kept a bottle of gin in her bottom drawer and had a well-earned reputation as a scowling battle-axe) would always respond with her default answer: “No reason. That’s just how those words are spelled.”
Obviously, one doesn’t have to be all that old to know that “No reason” rarely applies to anything we observe, especially the choices made by humans. But she seemed perfectly content with that answer. That always amazed me.
I resolved that if I ever became a teacher, I would do my best to avoid answering a student’s question with “No reason. That’s just how it is.”
A more general version of this phenomenon is undue deference to authority. In some sense school teachers are a form of authority. That does raise an interesting question about why exactly school teachers are taken as the supreme go-to trustworthy authority on matters of medicine(or whatever)?
I recall one version of an advertisement for Airborne™ which added an interesting phrase: “Created by a school teacher at her kitchen table!”
Why in the world would the words at her kitchen table add persuasive power to what appeared to be intended as some kind of boast? Are kitchen tables revered as a place where so many medical discoveries have been made? Do some people do their best thinking at kitchen tables?
I’ve seen company literature claiming that she actually measured out ingredients (including various folk medicines/herbs from China) and concocted them into pill-capsules at that iconic kitchen table. The rank amateur made her own “cure” and started selling them at a local mall. That doesn’t make me confident of efficacy at all. It scares me.
Indeed! And an authority-based epistemology is part of the problem one deals with in creationism – it’s a very common way of looking at the world. This, I am convinced, is why creationists talk about “Darwin” and “Darwinism” so much, even to the point of writing slanderous pseudo-biographies of the man: the idea is that all modern biology is fundamentally based upon the authority of one Charles Darwin. Undermine that authority, and the result can only be that creationism wins – or so the “thinking” goes.
I also see it in their reasoning: they don’t so much want to observe nature and draw principles therefrom, but come up with “laws” and declare that nature must be conforming to them. So, for example, the whole nonsensical “complex specified information” gig: we come up with a law that says some amount of CSI indicates design, and then we measure CSI in things, and bingo: answers! No recognition that even if you could do the first part, the reality would test the “law” rather than the “law” being tested by reality.
I remember investigating the gw letter combination in the county library. That’s when I first learned that there was a region called “Wales”. My first thought was, “Oh, that means I’ve been totally misunderstanding the royal title The Prince of Whales.” It was kind of a relief to realize that there was not a member of the British royal family who was in charge of the whales.
I wasn’t very bright at age 8. If I had been smarter, I wouldn’t have kept asking my second-grade teacher why various words were spelled that way. (As the old saying goes, the definition of stupid is trying the same thing again and again in the hopes that the outcome will be any different.)
Yep. This why the DI and AIG constantly attack Darwin and “Darwinism”. They know their target audience bases their beliefs on what they think is Supreme Authority, God and the Bible. They try to paint modern evolutionary theory as being decreed by the Authority Darwin instead of being based on a huge amount of consilient scientific discoveries. Then they set up the false dichotomy - which Authority will you believe, Darwin or God?
It’s all part of the ID-Creationism political strategy. Science knowledgeable people see the ruse clearly and are disgusted by the dishonesty. The ID True Believers swallow the guff hook line and sinker.
The queen also owns all of the dolphins and sturgeons in the waters surrounding Great Britain. I just now looked that up and found it dates back to a statute from 1324—and whales were actually included!
Not long ago, I rented Godolphin House in Cornwall from the National Trust for a week, so that some old friends and I could have an out-of-the-way vacation. I was surprised to find that the Godolphins (who, at a particular point in history, were good friends of the Marlboroughs and Queen Anne) in fact used dolphins as a kind of family totem. There’s a carved medieval dolphin head hanging on the wall in the living room, and it turns out to be one of a set of four, the other three of which hover above the tomb of some Godolphin family member in a church a few miles away.
Yes, and back then this family supported the dolphins in the annual dolphin-whale race off the coast of Cornwall. They would stand on the cliffs to watch, and shout “Go Dolphins! Go!”
