jason

Just a theory: Modern culture destroying science education - Boing Boing Gadgets

The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about the decline of science education, which has wussed out and become too interested in its own cultural propriety to adequately teach the nuts and bolts. We just don’t challenge kids with hard stuff like trig anymore, preferring that they have self-esteem, which qualifies them to have just gotten laid off by Starbucks….

Now, bringing women and minorities into all this marks the writer as an old fart. I bet a dollar he’s the type that weasel-words like a champ in the evolution debate, because The Left is science’s real enemy. But he’s right about how soft science education’s getting….

After all, science’s organized enemies all more or less openly proclaim their agendas. But the shallow pool of talent that results from a culture of entitlement isn’t something we can nail down, as it were, quite so easily.

Relevance: science is where the iPhones come from.

Yes, this is part of it. But the problem is, imho, that there is no autonomous play. There is no safe/dangerous play. There is no real experimentation. We ‘over program’, and the result of this an expectation that everything is either magic or doable without much effort. I’m not saying “kids today are like this or that”, each generation drops the ball on something. What I’m asking is what are we doing as educators to encourage and foster a creative exploration of the world and lived experience?

That said, I really liked the line, “We just don’t challenge kids with hard stuff like trig anymore, preferring that they have self-esteem, which qualifies them to have just gotten laid off by Starbucks…”

But from the article:

Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed at the level where they can eventually pursue graduate degrees must have not only abundant intellectual talent but also a powerful interest in sticking to a long course of cumulative study. A century ago, Max Weber wrote of “Science as a Vocation,” and, indeed, students need to feel something like a calling for science to surmount the numerous obstacles on the way to an advanced degree.

And it gets better:

The antiscience agenda is visible as early as kindergarten, with its infantile versions of the diversity agenda and its early budding of self-esteem lessons. But it complicates and propagates all the way up through grade school and high school. In college it often drops the mask of diffuse benevolence and hardens into a fascination with “identity.”

Of course I disagree. We DO start with children as scientists. Curious about the world and inquiring, children are born to explore and theorize. People like the author, if the author’s being honest, kill curiosity, exploration and theorizing through the formal institutionalization of lived experience (something that science has aided and abetted) in accountability factories of standardization (not all schools, just the ones that don’t actively thwart this). When students get to university, many have lost the desire to inquiry and explore, and rather want something they have been taught to want… (I’m not going to say what…).

You want scientists? You want FREE THINKERS? Cancel all the tests. Burn the curriculum. Turn the school into a forest and a laboratory, and learn what it means to play. Do that and people will line up for trig lessons… just so they can take play one step further. And they will freak out over the new technologies over at http://www.ecogeek.org/ and want to make them themselves. Give every child in your country the golden book of chemistry and teach them how to make gunpowder, and you’ll create a scientist full of wonder.