Rebecca, I really liked your post on luxury beliefs in education, which is what brought me here. I believe you have misunderstood the naturalistic fallacy. You come across as a supporter of an evidence-based approach, meaning that peer-reviewed research into what works will point us in the right pedagogical direction and tell us what we ought to do. The naturalistic fallacy isn’t doing the job you think it is here. It is not attacking the belief that “things that are natural are good”. Science can attack that belief, for example by showing that our inclination to eat sugar comes from genes that evolved when we lived in caves and had to store energy for long winters. The naturalistic fallacy is about what is morally right, supporting the idea that you can’t get to an ethical ‘ought’ from an empirical ‘is’. This means you can’t say it’s (morally) wrong to over-emphasise enquiry-based learning just because it’s ineffective. This is because it makes a value-judgment along the lines of ‘children ought to get a good education’. This moral ought can’t be scientifically established. Just to be clear, you can get round this by saying ‘If you want your child to be able to study complex concepts, then you need a decent amount of teacher input rather than enquiry-based learning’. What you’re saying about enquiry-based learning isn’t wrong, you should just avoid citing the naturalistic fallacy as it’s about whether you can use observation/empirical evidence to verify ethical propositions..
Rebecca, I really liked your post on luxury beliefs in education, which is what brought me here. I believe you have misunderstood the naturalistic fallacy. You come across as a supporter of an evidence-based approach, meaning that peer-reviewed research into what works will point us in the right pedagogical direction and tell us what we ought to do. The naturalistic fallacy isn’t doing the job you think it is here. It is not attacking the belief that “things that are natural are good”. Science can attack that belief, for example by showing that our inclination to eat sugar comes from genes that evolved when we lived in caves and had to store energy for long winters. The naturalistic fallacy is about what is morally right, supporting the idea that you can’t get to an ethical ‘ought’ from an empirical ‘is’. This means you can’t say it’s (morally) wrong to over-emphasise enquiry-based learning just because it’s ineffective. This is because it makes a value-judgment along the lines of ‘children ought to get a good education’. This moral ought can’t be scientifically established. Just to be clear, you can get round this by saying ‘If you want your child to be able to study complex concepts, then you need a decent amount of teacher input rather than enquiry-based learning’. What you’re saying about enquiry-based learning isn’t wrong, you should just avoid citing the naturalistic fallacy as it’s about whether you can use observation/empirical evidence to verify ethical propositions..