Googling Professor Ronald Laura? Part Two

You may ask yourself, why am I so upset.

1. What Ronald Laura says is wrong and dangerous.

From the website of RPL I extract this core of his philosophy of science- wrong, and stupid, and dangerous. (http://www.dr-ronlaura.com/philos.html)

“My view is thus diametrically opposed to the orthodox philosophical view of knowledge and technology which holds that neither knowledge nor technology is 'good' nor 'bad' in itself; it is only how they are used, so the argument goes, that makes them good or bad.

Against this, I am urging that because the conventional and covert rationale which drives technology is to manifest power over nature, its deployment will inevitably lead on the on hand to the degradation and exploitation of nature, while on the other to our alienation and increasing detachment from the world of nature and the earth which sustains all life.

One of the major reasons why our form of technological instruction in schools is so obsessed with reducing the things of the natural world into reconstructed forms or manufactured things is that the more chemicalised, decomposed and inert we can make the world, the easier it is for us to predict its behaviour and thus secure a modicum of power over it. Indeed, at first blush it does seem that we have succeeded in making the world predictable and thus more amenable to subjudgation by reducing and then redescribing the natural world in terms of the statistical and mathematical representations intended as a substitute for it.

Once the reduction is complete, we make this abstraction of the natural world more concretely predictable by reconfiguring our statistics in graphs, grids, and tables replete with abbreviations, acronyms, and even pseudonyms designed to give the illusion of life to our reconstructions of nature, whose technologised forms are actually increasingly synthetic, artificial, inert and unreal.”

Of course we all want to be able to predict and control our environment. If we cannot do this, we are unable to act at all. We become passive victims. All ‘knowledge’ is useless if it does not enable us to somehow predict and control what is going on around us.

Science is distinguished in being the radical democratic form of knowledge. It is the form of knowledge open to everyone. There is no gnosis, no hidden way to truth only known to the alpha males or alpha females of the tribe. Anyone can do it.

Like Feynman said:

How to Discover a New Physical Law

First you guess.

Don't laugh, this is the most important step.

Then you compute the consequences.

Compare the consequences to experience.

If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong.

In that simple statement is the key to science.

It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is.

If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong.

That's all there is to it.

What does Ronald Laura posit in opposition to this egalitarian method of seeking truth? He does not offer the valid mystical insight that the ultimate nature of reality is unknown and unknowable. He is not content to bow humbly before the vastness and wonder of-all-that-is, conscious of how inadequate his mind is to grasp it all.

No, he offers the only alternative that has ever been offered to science. And he offers it with all the dogmatism and all the irrationalism with which it has usually been offered. The alternative to science is submission to authority. Believing what someone else tells you. In this case, what he tells you. That's why he has all those testimonials to the effectiveness of his body-building system on his website.

2. Where Ronald Laura said what he said on Saturday May 3rd 2008 was an abuse of his position.

We came to hear him give a talk cogent to the abstract I have quoted below. I have been informed that he did get around to talking about it eventually. But first, he spent a long time outlining his stupid wrong and dangerous philosophy, with all the rhetorical eloquence and all the alpha-male authority-figure symbols at his command. That is not what was advertised.

On Friday May 2nd 2008 I gave a talk about the Greenhouse Effect and Anthropogenic Global Warming to a group of foreign students finishing their English studies before beginning their degree programs (volunteers are called for to lecture every year so the students can practice their note-taking in practice lecture situations).

As you know if you have ever been to this site before, I have very strong and idiosyncratic views about what should be done about Anthropogenic Global Warming. The students I spoke to still have no idea whatsoever what those views are. I told the coordinator I was going to talk about the science, and that's what I did. I talked about the same settled science and gave the same talk outlining the very solid theoretical basis and the reasonably solid experimental basis for Anthropogenic Global Warming that someone with diametrically opposite views to mine would have given.

I would consider it an abuse of my position as a perceived authority figure to get up and foist my individual philosophical or political views on an audience who are listening to me because of my expertise in another field. That would be unprofessional behaviour.

Googling Professor Ronald Laura?

I have met the enemy.

And he is this man.

I attended 2/3 of a talk he gave yesterday. While garnished with the usual eduspeak, the abstract of his talk had sounded pretty good:



As the parent of gifted children out in the boondocks, feeling these effects of personal and emotional isolation, I was hoping to gain some useful insights from the Professor’s talk. And I agree completely that there are limitations to what technology can do in education, that a lot of the ‘gee-whiz’ education material on the internet is a waste of time, and that technological resources need to be balanced with more ‘personal and interrelational’ ways to – er – ‘support the development of children’s socioaffective natural potential into performance.’ I also think that over-reliance on Powerpoint is doing bad things for teaching and communication in my discipline, so he immediately had me onside by not using it, striding back and forth talking to us conversationally instead. He spoke very well. And he had a beautiful voice. A deep, authoritative, voice, with a mellifluous Bostonian accent.


By 2/3 of the scheduled time through his lecture, he hadn’t yet said anything that was cogent to the abstract.

He had started with some funny anecdotes about when he first arrived in Oxford to do his doctorate.

He had talked about a Mercedes-Benz advertisement announcing that they were putting air-bags in the rear, as well as the front, after an accident involving someone trying to negotiate a motorway exit at 240 km/h in one of their cars, in which the occupants of the air-bag equipped front of the vehicle had lived and the passengers in the back had died. ‘We think we can solve all of our problems with technology,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t any suggestion in the ad that maybe people ought to slow down a bit. Or that we should make cars that don’t go so fast. We immediately resort to technology to shield ourselves from the natural consequences of our actions.’ Well, okay. That was an okay sort of analogy. Maybe making cars a bit slower would be good. If you could sell them.

He talked about the Garden of Eden, and how the first act of Adam and Eve after eating the fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil had been to invent technology: sewing themselves clothes out of fig leaves.

He told us a pointless story about the nine-times table.

He talked about how in our Western societies knowledge was seen as power which was the same as dominance which was the same as something else which I couldn’t see because that bit of the whiteboard was hidden behind some useless bit of audio-visual equipment.

He said that the technology that came out of this knowledge shared the same original sin, if you will, as the knowledge itself.

On he went- sonorous, sweeping, sincere, non-sequitur after non-sequitur, abusing western science and technology as authoritarian and dehumanising. He didn’t call for dialogue with us, the audience. He wore a suit. Nobody else wore suits. He had degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford. We didn't. The authority in his voice repelled dialogue, compelling me to sit meekly in my seat trying to project ‘I know more than you’ through body language.

‘He is sweeping everyone along,’ I told the person next to me. ‘But what he is saying is wrong. And dangerous.’

He said something about how we should not be educating aboriginal children with the same kind of knowledge that we educated our own children with: it was tainted, unnatural knowledge, and it was more appropriate to teach their culturally-appropriate, natural knowledge. There was , unbelievably, what I took to be a gentle murmur of assent from the audience. Earlier that day another speaker had quoted figures saying that 20% of Year 7 aboriginal students in remote parts of New South Wales met the numeracy benchmarks. (These are pitifully easy benchmarks, met by more than 90% of students in metropolitan areas).

I left.

So I don’t know if he got to talking about nurturing the socio-emotional needs of gifted children or not. He might have, and he might even have said something that would be useful to me as a parent. But I didn’t stick around. I couldn’t take it anymore.

And- would you believe, would you believe- googling him this morning, I find that he has written a book with John Ashton!!




This man was Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Newcastle. Heaven help us!