[WikiEN-l] Little Napoleans

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> From: geni <geniice at gmail.com>
>
> On 1/13/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at waterwiki.info> wrote:
>> 'I've run afoul of the rules lawyers on Wikipedia many times. It's  
>> getting to the point where >you can't even say the sky is blue  
>> without one of these little Napoleans squawking, "Original  
>> >research! Need citation!"'
>
> Problem is whith that classic example is that the sky often isn't
> blue. It spends a fair bit of time being black with white bits.
> Depending on where you are grey may be popular and red/pink may appear
> as much as twice a day.

Yeah, and remember the song from South Pacific: "When the sky is a  
bright canary yellow/I forget every cloud I’ve ever seen./So they  
call me a cockeyed optimist,/Immature and incurably green..."

Actually, I've been brooding about this topic since it came up last  
year, and I've been troubled by the meta-question:

WHY is "the sky is blue" taken as the emblematic unchallengeable  
fact, since it's not even close to being true?

I think the answer is that we've been brainwashed by being _told_ in  
elementary school that "the sky is blue," and we continue to believe  
it as having some quality of magical truth to it, even though we can  
see with our own eyes that it is false.

In fact, I don't think we're actually told that the sky IS blue, I  
think we're told that we should "color the sky blue." On doing a  
little Google Books searching, I found some entries that suggest that  
the reason we were told that is not because it is a science fact that  
little minds should know, but because coloring is a classic  
educational arena for teaching children how to follow instructions:
"Children must learn to follow directions for many reasons... Say,  
"Color the sky blue." Children then are ready to be given two  
instructions to follow, and they follow them in order: "Color the  
grass green and the sky blue." •Next they learn to follow three  
instructions..." Burmeister, Lou E. (1983). Foundations and  
Strategies for Teaching Children to Read. Addison-Wesley. ISBN  
020110802X. , p. 103

"Now we are going to color some of the picture together," I tell  
them... "What color do you think Mary's dress could be?" They decide  
on blue. I move around as they color the dress. Then we look at shoes  
and color Mary's shoes black, and finally we color the grass green.  
Later they will get the chance to finish the picture using whatever  
colors they want. Approaching coloring in this way seems to help the  
children who have little or no experience with coloring and prevents  
them from taking one crayon and making random marks over the paper."  
Josephine McLaughlin, Sylvia Andrews (2003): "Soaring With Reading  
and Writing: a highly effective emergent literacy program," p. 67.

P. S. Speaking of things that we can see with our own eyes are  
false... Genesis 1:16 says "And God made two great lights; the  
greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the  
night: he made the stars also." Why aren't fundamentalists troubled  
by the fact that you frequently see the moon during the day, and  
frequently can't see it at night?