Op-Ed Contributor - Put a Little Science in Your Life - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com:
But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.
[...]
If science isn’t your strong suit — and for many it’s not — this side of science is something you may have rarely if ever experienced. I’ve spoken with so many people over the years whose encounters with science in school left them thinking of it as cold, distant and intimidating. They happily use the innovations that science makes possible, but feel that the science itself is just not relevant to their lives. What a shame.
Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension.
It’s one thing to go outside on a crisp, clear night and marvel at a sky full of stars. It’s another to marvel not only at the spectacle but to recognize that those stars are the result of exceedingly ordered conditions 13.7 billion years ago at the moment of the Big Bang. It’s another still to understand how those stars act as nuclear furnaces that supply the universe with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, the raw material of life as we know it.
And it’s yet another level of experience to realize that those stars account for less than 4 percent of what’s out there — the rest being of an unknown composition, so-called dark matter and energy, which researchers are now vigorously trying to divine.
As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work — we begin life as little scientists. But most of us quickly lose our intrinsic scientific passion. And it’s a profound loss.
A great many studies have focused on this problem, identifying important opportunities for improving science education. Recommendations have ranged from increasing the level of training for science teachers to curriculum reforms.
But most of these studies (and their suggestions) avoid an overarching systemic issue: in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details.
[...] But rare is the high school class, and rarer still is the middle school class, in which these breakthroughs are introduced. It’s much the same story in classes for biology, chemistry and mathematics.
At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B. When A happened a few hundred years ago, it’s a long climb to the modern era. Certainly, when it comes to teaching the technicalities — solving this equation, balancing that reaction, grasping the discrete parts of the cell — the verticality of science is unassailable.
But science is so much more than its technical details. And with careful attention to presentation, cutting-edge insights and discoveries can be clearly and faithfully communicated to students independent of those details; in fact, those insights and discoveries are precisely the ones that can drive a young student to want to learn the details. We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars.
Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this drama. We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living.
It’s the birthright of every child, it’s a necessity for every adult, to look out on the world, as the soldier in Iraq did, and see that the wonder of the cosmos transcends everything that divides us.
There's lots of emphasis on "reading" and "mathematics" in NCLB and most other curriculum programs, but literature and arithmetic are not the only things one reads and does "math" on. If we really want our students to learn reading comprehension, we should have them read history more closely. If we REALLY want our students to "get" math, we should give them more of an insight into the DEEP relationship math has had with science for the last six-hundred years. We give them mathematical physics (mechanics) as seniors, but only if a student actually lasts that long in a science program. The reality is there's nothing in senior physics that someone taking algebra 1 couldn't grasp, especially if they learn that most of algebra 1 was derived because of the mechanics covered in physics, so why not share the two more closely?
Mathematics is not arbitrary - every bit of what we teach came about because of some physical observation that needed some more complex means of rendering to examine and solve. The two, science and math, are inseparable, whether the binding of analytic geometry and calculus with physics, or the binding of statistics with sociology and biology.
Similarly, one can learn plenty of facts and vocabulary reading history, government, and current events, as one can reading fiction, so why this extreme emphasis on reading fiction at the expense of reading about the facts that govern their lives and their relationships with other countries and with fellow members of their own county, city, state, and nation, and the truth (dirty facts, "un-christian" attitudes, and all) about our founding fathers that made it that way, and why they did so.
Sometime, between private interests (i.e., "christian" parents) trying to "protect" their kids from dangerous ideas (i.e., anything that goes against what their interpretation of the Bible "teaches"), and budget cuts in education programs to the extreme, and then the federal government's little program to cover that debt only pushing those basics of "reading and arithmetic" without any regard to the broader context, education has dumbed itself down to near uselessness, and increasingly we're finding that college education programs are having to make up a significant gap before the professors can even begin to teach what used to be "the basics" of a university program in history, math, or science.
I say it's time we take our children's future back from that darkness, while we still have the chance.
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