Formal schooling in history and botany does not teach people to see living evidence
Evidence
The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have ‘taken’ what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have ‘taken’ what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book? — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 170
Categorization
- SEED: The weed-as-history-book metaphor is a strong interpretive-framing move for the reading-the-landscape course.
- XREF: connects to: Formal education can erode rather than sharpen perception of the natural world — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 83; Lay theorists avoid seeking disconfirming evidence rather than falsifying hypotheses