Scientific daydream

It’s a hot Saturday, and young Holly Hypothetical is playing inside while her father Harold is sitting on the back porch, sipping sweet tea.  Flies buzz outside the screen.  In the distance he can hear birds, traffic, a train, a jet.  The Adirondack chair, for being made of wood, is surprisingly comfortable.  He dozes off.

In his Department Of Education-approved daydream, he sees his child sitting at a neat little table with a chrome lamp, doing her “science homework”.  A textbook is open, and her face shows a look of concentration and purpose. She seems strangely unaware of him as he walks behind her to look over her shoulder at the pages of the book. 

Her lamp glares on the shiny pages.  What he can make out of the text seems dry, carefully vetted by bureaucrats who have made a personal mission of stripping every last bit of revolutionary, disruptive excitement from the greatest discoveries of humanity. The child’s attention begins to drift.  Her phone vibrates and she eagerly snatches it up, texting her friend about something that happened at school.

Are the contents of that inferior textbook the only science she will ever be expected to learn?  Will that equip her as a citizen of a technological society, or as a human being in an amazing universe? 

Harold wakes with a start, knocking his tea off the armrest, drenching the cat, who bolts through the cat door to the yard.  He sits perspiring, eyes wide; Is that really how it is? How can Holly become an adult who goes further in scientific understanding?  Will she ever get beyond that horrid textbook?...

Recently I’ve had a few adults tell me they didn’t learn much about science in school.  I’m tempted to get lost in observations about school district leadership, but that isn’t going to change.  And federal education policy… well let’s just not hold our breath waiting on that one, OK? 

I’m not exactly sure what started it for me. I spent my childhood digging fossils out of a rock quarry in Iowa City, peering into an old microscope at pond water, and building galvanometers and induction coils.  My teen years were happily spent on the geology of central Washington and East Tennessee. Even today I always have a magnifying glass with me. So this post is for parents, kids, teachers, and anyone else who wants to fill in the gaps.  It’s not a universal prescription, just a few bright pebbles I’ve found along the way.  Pebbles I can’t stop looking at, turning over in my hands, hefting, studying, pelting the other kids in the class…

Most of what I’ve read about scientific literacy education goes something like this:

  • Here’s why science is important and you should study it
  • Here’s some fundamental concepts in science
  • Here’s some supporting information to those concepts

An interested person will learn a lot from that approach. But the important point is “interested person”.  The resistance that lack of interest places in the path of learning is almost impossible to overcome.  The propulsion that fascination and wonder give to learning is almost impossible to restrain.  As Dorothy Parker said; “There is no cure for curiosity”.  But how to start the fire?

Somehow it got through to me that science can be personal.  It’s the study of this table, that bird, the air I breathe, my body, this frog, that fly, those stars.  Because, while it is true that not everyone can (or would want to) work on protein folding projects or find the Higgs boson, in some respects everyone can do science.  Everyone can look at the world around them - not something from a textbook, but the actual world they can see and touch - in the context of complex spatial and temporal enormity. It’s so stunningly different from the traditional way, or the advertising way, that it’s as if the sun just came up for the first time.

Scientific literacy includes factual knowledge, yes, but it also requires understanding of how that knowledge is established. The attempt to carve out permanent boundaries around a set of ‘science facts’ is a misrepresentation. Science is a working model, not a finished sculpture to the ages.  This bothers some people who want a final answer.  They want to put it on the shelf and turn their back on it and have it be the same in their grandchildren’s time.  They want science to act like traditional knowledge, which stays put - and is reliable only in the same sense that a stopped clock is right twice a day.

One really important science idea is that if you look at any phenomenon closely enough, you can figure it out or somebody eventually will.  It may seem mysterious but it’s a lock to be picked, not a trick of the gods. “Looking closely” is not easy; it involves logically careful methods, accurate instrumentation, data collection, analysis and documentation.  When you’re done, and others have checked your work through a brutal process called “peer review“, you’ve got a bit of reality in your pocket, on which you and others can build.

Those bits of reality are hard-won, but they get no protection.  And that’s another important idea in science: that if somebody comes up with a better explanation, and they can demonstrate it in a way that holds up under attack, their explanation becomes the accepted one.  The old explanation, the one you worked so hard for, is tossed aside. While that may sound like a harsh rule, it means that our explanations and predictions steadily improve. 

Scientific Literacy is not the same thing as scientific expertise, however.  And this is where even scientists go wrong sometimes. That ever-growing and ever-solidifying understanding of the real world means most scientists are specialists in some particular field.  When you see a mathematician going on about how evolution isn’t logical, or a chemist dabbling in climatology, they’re out of their field and mistaking literacy for expertise.  And as soon as they do that, a religious organization or an oil company or a tobacco company will step right up to make sure they have a forum - usually not peer-reviewed, so no one’s checking their work - to broadcast their mistake directly to the public.

Which leads to another important point: the popular media is full of reporters who are working on deadline.  There’s nothing they love better than a pre-packaged story from a think tank, and if it gets them home earlier, they might not look very closely at how the story was funded.  And this should be motivationally important to young Holly Hypothetical at the study table.

Some children need nothing more than to hold a fossil in their hands, or to see Saturn through a telescope, to ignite a lifelong fascination in science.  But not every child will be motivated by geeky fun.  Luckily even nonscientists can find lots of practical uses for science, and here’s one.  There are a lot of people who have reasons to lie to us: corporations, used car salesmen, politicians, preachers and hucksters of every kind, and their lies can hurt us badly.  Kids need to know that science gives them a powerful baloney detector they can use in self-defense against liars of all kinds. 

So… wow!  Awesome mysteries of the universe explained, technological empowerment, and a super-powered lie detector!  Bring on the scientific literacy! 

If you can get someone interested in something, they will learn about it. But school systems are under tremendous pressure to cram facts into our children’s heads, like so many Styrofoam peanuts into a box. For an uninterested child, that’s like trying to push a rope uphill.  There is little time for the motivational magic of fascination and wonder, even though teachers do try to wedge it in where they can.  So it’s up to us:

Adults should model the behavior they want in their kids. Start reading the science section of your newspaper.  Subscribe to National Geographic, and maybe a science magazine like New Scientist or Scientific American.  Pin this month’s Geographic map on the kitchen wall.  Make more science-oriented TV viewing choices.

Wrap your observations in a larger context:  Notice the birds in your yard and mark up a map with their migratory routes. If you see unusual wildlife (like a fox in the city) or for that matter any wildlife, mark it on your calendar. Find out what they eat, and what eats them.

And there are some - what to call them? - scientific stories that can really throw open the gates.  Here’s an example of one that deeply affected me:

I was stunned by a Scientific American Libraries’ book, Powers Of Ten .  It was based on this video;

(I would love to see this 1968 film updated with better narration and music. There’s even an excellent Simpson’s parody, but it seems to have been pulled from YouTube.)

After reading the book I started thinking how narrow the traditional view of our existence really is.  Despite all the talk of God and eternity and infinity, somehow it was even more mind-blowing to ponder the fact that we can actually measure the dimensions of atoms and of galaxies.  All it took was to start looking at the universe with the confidence that eventually, we could figure it out piece by piece.

OK, “we” in the same sense that “we” win the Bulls’ basketball games.  But still; the universe is present in a cell in your hand, not in some vague philosophical way but in the continuity of scale.  The same chemistry applies in your hand as in the Pleiades.  The atoms in the cell are star stuff, forged from smaller particles in a dying sun billions of years before you drew your first breath.  That’s what I mean by temporal and spatial enormity, and our place in it.

Go outside and try some of the science activities listed below the fold.  Read a particularly exciting National Geographic article to your children.  Watch Scientific American Frontiers.  Read the biography of Marie Curie.  Watch the NOVA video Einstein’s Big Idea together as a family.  (It’s an exciting story spanning several centuries, full of discovery, intrigue, death, and even sex)

Teachers today have their jobs defined for them in terms of standardized tests but if a teacher accomplished nothing more than instilling an insatiable love of learning, it would be a job well done.  There’s no way to pursue wonder, awe, and excitement directly; this is only a little of the disorganized approach by which it came to me.  Below the fold are some suggested books, videos, resources and activities to get the ball rolling.  There’s definitely enough here to get started…

Continued...

Posted by George on 07/23/08 at 10:12 PM
Education • (8) Comments • Link
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