[referring to Warby, 27 Feb 97] I'm certainly sympathetic to the complaints about university instruction, especially when delivered by faculty who should know better! For some time, I've carried around a number of observations about the paradox:
(1) The failure of ID faculty to do what they say is among the most powerful arguments that telling isn't teaching--even when the person doing the telling is you.
(2) Serious ID is hard and time-consuming. One could argue that an ID seminar is so fully constrained by its circumstances that serious ID isn't possible, and that ineffective instruction is the only solution with acceptable cost. I wouldn't argue that, but one could.
(3) The more you know about a subject, the more independent a learner you can be, and the less you need in the way of heavy-duty instructional support. Which is why an experienced programmer can usually learn a new programming language without much formal training, unless the new language is too unlike what the programmer already knows.
(4) Which is another way of saying, thank goodness that we all learn in spite of instruction! Otherwise, none of us would be here! (You can't stop a human from learning. It is not true that a full court ID press is needed on all lessons for learning to occur. The purpose of instruction is to make it better and faster.)
Be careful about glossy little phrases like, "scientifically proven principles." I think most of your professors would agree that there's very little in this field which is indisputably "scientifically proven." That doesn't mean good science is impossible, irrelevant or unimportant in this field (quite the opposite, in my view). It does mean that the relationship between scientific investigation and ID principles is neither simple nor direct.
Flames, anyone? Surely I broke somebody's balloon.