From the past

[Holmes]

I'm 61 years old and was born in Liverpool, England.

As a child (perhaps 8 or 9) my mother saw an ad in a magazine to buy a set of children's encyclopedias, with this deal we got all the books at once and simply paid the small monthly fee until paid off, we were poor so this was not trivial.

I was actually unwell the day these books arrived, I was lying under a blanket on a couch near our coal fire when she walked in and announced this purchase and carried in these two large heavy boxes, dumped them by the couch and left me to read, this was a life changing event for me and led to my interest in all matters technical and scientific.

The books were these:

Now long lost I still have very fond memories of sitting around our house on a quiet sunny day or winter evening, deeply immersed in these books. There was a structure that included history, religion, science, art and so on, also a fun section "Things to make and do" which also leaned in a science direction.

Later as an adult I stumbled upon a complete set of these and bought them (52 weekly magazines stored in two binders):

 

These were published in the 1930s, shortly before WW2 and would have been extremely interesting to me as a child, I still peruse these from time to time.

The point of this post is to ask whether others here initially learned about science in this way and what do you think of todays options, do children still read books like this? are there magazines published like these?

I have absolutely no idea how my learning experience would have gone had I had access to the web as we do today, I work in technology and use the internet heavily so I'm aware of its nature, I kind of think that it would not be as rich an experience as it was back then but this is inevitably subjective.

 

 

 

 

Edited June 29, 2021 by Holmes
spelling

[swansont]

A similar path I had was a set of Time-Life books on science.

We had a Grolier encyclopedia set, which was a prize contestants (my mom) got for appearing on Jeopardy!

[Holmes]

11 minutes ago, swansont said:

A similar path I had was a set of Time-Life books on science.

We had a Grolier encyclopedia set, which was a prize contestants (my mom) got for appearing on Jeopardy!

They were great books, I recall having two or three of those that I picked up or found or were given to me.

In particular was the one on "Water" I recall falling asleep in the bath tub reading that, the bottom of the book got wet, it amused my young daughter no end when I told her that!

 

 

[studiot]

Yes thanks for sharing +1

I guess that there have been many routes to our present situations.

I rather breezed through the low quality and frankly boring science available a decade earlier
It was not until upper high school that I really got going with the physical sciences.
The culture in primary and lower high school and the wider society in southern England at that time was not exactly anti-scinece, just disinterested in the subject.
I only really got enthused by the physical geography we covered.

Outside school I had the public library (I could borrow my mother's adult ticket) where most of the 'science' sections consisted of biographies and the Odhams children's encyclopedia, which I can't praise enough. and Leonardo de Vries' Book of Experiments.

[Holmes]

19 minutes ago, studiot said:

Yes thanks for sharing +1

I guess that there have been many routes to our present situations.

I rather breezed through the low quality and frankly boring science available a decade earlier
It was not until upper high school that I really got going with the physical sciences.
The culture in primary and lower high school and the wider society in southern England at that time was not exactly anti-scinece, just disinterested in the subject.
I only really got enthused by the physical geography we covered.

Outside school I had the public library (I could borrow my mother's adult ticket) where most of the 'science' sections consisted of biographies and the Odhams children's encyclopedia, which I can't praise enough. and Leonardo de Vries' Book of Experiments.

Ahh libraries, I forgot to mention those, do children still visit libraries in this day and age?

I was most fortunate, Liverpool had/has a superb central library close to the museum, it was stuffed full of books and has many valuable editions too, this is a recent picture.

Since I left the area some forty years ago there have been modernizations but that reading room remains. Back in the late 70s when I'd visit there and spend all day sometimes, I'd also explore many little back passageways around the rim of that room, these often led to quiet, dusty, unused office rooms with remnants of activity in days gone by, no idea what those areas were ever really used for.

There were other large rectangular rooms too, not just that circular reading room, the place was a maze and I was able to find many very obscure old books on mathematics and physics, some of which had clearly never been taken out since they were purchased by the library, which was often decades earlier.

 

Edited June 29, 2021 by Holmes

[MigL]

Spent whole days in local libraries, from the public one, the high school one, Brock U library ( where I attended ) and the much larger McMaster U library in nearby Hamilton.
The best time was March, when the yearly release of Janes: All the Worlds Aircraft came out.
I would spend the whole weekend in the library, because, even in the 80s, that book went for about $800.

Edited June 29, 2021 by MigL

[Holmes]

26 minutes ago, MigL said:

Spent whole days in local libraries, from the public one, the high school one, Brock U library ( where I attended ) and the much larger McMaster U library in nearby Hamilton.
The best time was March, when the yearly release of Janes: All the Worlds Aircraft came out.
I would spend the whole weekend in the library, because, even in the 80s, that book went for about $800.

I can understand that remark about Jane's, libraries were good for that, stuff beyond our reach was accessible.

I recall finding part of the Liverpool library that held periodicals, what a thorough and huge collection they had, I first encountered Byte magazine in fact in that library and was able to peruse many electronics and radio periodicals too, sometimes as far back as the 1920s or so.

[CharonY]

3 hours ago, Holmes said:

I have absolutely no idea how my learning experience would have gone had I had access to the web as we do today, I work in technology and use the internet heavily so I'm aware of its nature, I kind of think that it would not be as rich an experience as it was back then but this is inevitably subjective.

I agree. Growing up working-class immigrant poor we initially could not afford books, imagine my joy when I found the public library! The town was small and so was the library but at that point it was like an infinite amount of free candy.

There is a lot I could lament about the internet experience, but I do feel that having too much info (and much of it of low quality and merely bite-sized) takes away from the desire (and enjoyment) to really dig into something. In the last 10-15 years or so, there is a noticeable shift in how kids experience learn and is heavily impacting their performance when it comes to more complex matters. It also has soundly refuted my assumptions regarding the role of technology in information gathering and learning that I had when I was young.

Oh god, we are old, aren't we?

 

 

[Holmes]

5 minutes ago, CharonY said:

I agree. Growing up working-class immigrant poor we initially could not afford books, imagine my joy when I found the public library! The town was small and so was the library but at that point it was like an infinite amount of free candy.

There is a lot I could lament about the internet experience, but I do feel that having too much info (and much of it of low quality and merely bite-sized) takes away from the desire (and enjoyment) to really dig into something. In the last 10-15 years or so, there is a noticeable shift in how kids experience learn and is heavily impacting their performance when it comes to more complex matters. It also has soundly refuted my assumptions regarding the role of technology in information gathering and learning that I had when I was young.

Oh god, we are old, aren't we?

 

 

Yes we are, perhaps age is part of this.

I get the impression though that youngsters who use the web to learn tend to focus on getting specific answers to questions rather than developing insights into area of knowledge that might allow them to develop an answer or derive it themselves.

My nephew some ten years ago (he was like fourteen) was starting to do this with electronics at home (he lived overseas and was on a visit) he would seek out very specific answers to very specific questions rather than study the subject. I was in a book store with him and offered to buy him a rather good book on electronics, a book I would have absolutely gone crazy over when I was fourteen had anybody offered.

He was quite disinterested, it seemed all too much, unnecessary, why read all those chapters when he can just ask this or that question on the web and get some answers back?

 

[zapatos]

4 hours ago, swansont said:

A similar path I had was a set of Time-Life books on science.

 

We had that very set from Time-Life and I read through every one as a kid. What an eye opener it was for me!

[MigL]

You guys sound like old men griping about how things are changing; and how you don't like it because that's not the way you did things back in the day.
Fact is, kids, if they have an interest in a subject, have access to way more information on that subject than we ever did.
And the same kids who delve deep into an internet subject today, would have done the same, with books, 40-50 years ago.
The ones who didn't then, don't do so now either.

[exchemist]

5 hours ago, Holmes said:

I'm 61 years old and was born in Liverpool, England.

As a child (perhaps 8 or 9) my mother saw an ad in a magazine to buy a set of children's encyclopedias, with this deal we got all the books at once and simply paid the small monthly fee until paid off, we were poor so this was not trivial.

I was actually unwell the day these books arrived, I was lying under a blanket on a couch near our coal fire when she walked in and announced this purchase and carried in these two large heavy boxes, dumped them by the couch and left me to read, this was a life changing event for me and led to my interest in all matters technical and scientific.

The books were these:

Now long lost I still have very fond memories of sitting around our house on a quiet sunny day or winter evening, deeply immersed in these books. There was a structure that included history, religion, science, art and so on, also a fun section "Things to make and do" which also leaned in a science direction.

Later as an adult I stumbled upon a complete set of these and bought them (52 weekly magazines stored in two binders):

 

These were published in the 1930s, shortly before WW2 and would have been extremely interesting to me as a child, I still peruse these from time to time.

The point of this post is to ask whether others here initially learned about science in this way and what do you think of todays options, do children still read books like this? are there magazines published like these?

I have absolutely no idea how my learning experience would have gone had I had access to the web as we do today, I work in technology and use the internet heavily so I'm aware of its nature, I kind of think that it would not be as rich an experience as it was back then but this is inevitably subjective.

 

 

 

 

Yes, for me the spark was kindled at about the age of seven by Lincoln Barnett's book version of  "The World We Live In", which had wonderful panoramas of the creatures of each geological period - plus a completely wrong (pre-plate tectonics) account of mountain-building.  

[swansont]

19 minutes ago, MigL said:

You guys sound like old men griping about how things are changing

Not meant as such from me. More of a “what spurred you on as a kid, without an internet at your fingertips”

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, Holmes said:

I get the impression though that youngsters who use the web to learn tend to focus on getting specific answers to questions rather than developing insights into area of knowledge that might allow them to develop an answer or derive it themselves.

I think a big part of it is how schooling might have changed. It in class I noticed that kids are more focused on getting the right answer rather than understanding the why. And despite the fact that MigL has a point, I think there is genuine qualitative change that is associated with how media are consumed.

I think there are several connected things that play into it and one of them is the way how media are presented and consumed. Reading papers in class was something I have done for a long time, but in the last 5 years or so, as part of student evaluations it has been consistently criticized as being far too much work. Students are now very uncomfortable when it comes to applying knowledge, they are obsessed with right and wrong answers. Much of it is due to schooling. I am not sure how common it is, but I was told recently that in school students would regularly get question catalogues and all exams would need to be on the list. Consequently, students are really unhappy when the task in an exam is now to apply things and so on. It is not everybody, of course. However, the proportion of folks struggling with this kind of tasks have been increased and curving has become more and more extreme.

That being said, there is of course the argument to be made that because folks are consuming media differently, we should teach differently, too (and the question catalogue is presumably one such measure). But honestly, I am a bit at a loss, if reading and synthesizing scientific literature is becoming harder and harder to teach. And at least in my field of expertise I cannot compress information into one interesting tweet.

 

 

 

[Holmes]

9 minutes ago, CharonY said:

I think a big part of it is how schooling might have changed. It in class I noticed that kids are more focused on getting the right answer rather than understanding the why. And despite the fact that MigL has a point, I think there is genuine qualitative change that is associated with how media are consumed.

I think there are several connected things that play into it and one of them is the way how media are presented and consumed. Reading papers in class was something I have done for a long time, but in the last 5 years or so, as part of student evaluations it has been consistently criticized as being far too much work. Students are now very uncomfortable when it comes to applying knowledge, they are obsessed with right and wrong answers. Much of it is due to schooling. I am not sure how common it is, but I was told recently that in school students would regularly get question catalogues and all exams would need to be on the list. Consequently, students are really unhappy when the task in an exam is now to apply things and so on. It is not everybody, of course. However, the proportion of folks struggling with this kind of tasks have been increased and curving has become more and more extreme.

That being said, there is of course the argument to be made that because folks are consuming media differently, we should teach differently, too (and the question catalogue is presumably one such measure). But honestly, I am a bit at a loss, if reading and synthesizing scientific literature is becoming harder and harder to teach. And at least in my field of expertise I cannot compress information into one interesting tweet.

Yep, I heard recently about this emphasis on getting the right answers, its easy to mark someone work on that basis I guess and we all know that teachers are over worked and under paid as it is.

Plus we have the growth of "edutainment" where it seems to be felt that "fun" needs to be injected into a subject when in reality a truly interested student will already find the subject itself fun.

The internet carries the risk of reducing attention span too, it is inherently distracting anyway not to mention endless pop-ups, overly flashy presentation, the temptation to browse this or that without effort.

Having said all that when I want facts or details or history I can find them fast on the internet whereas before then it was time consuming.

[CharonY]

11 minutes ago, Holmes said:

Having said all that when I want facts or details or history I can find them fast on the internet whereas before then it was time consuming.

Absolutely, one of the things I assumed was going to happen when the internet came up is that we would see a massive jump in knowledge generation. I thought that folks would actually go away from fact-learning and more toward knowledge building and application, as facts or details would be so easy to get.

As it turns out, at least one of the challenges that the information is actively getting diluted by bad info, and much time needs to be spent to vet information.

[zapatos]

1 hour ago, MigL said:

You guys sound like old men griping about how things are changing; and how you don't like it because that's not the way you did things back in the day.

I wasn't griping and I like the internet just fine. I was just having a fond memory from my youth that was triggered by the picture of some books. I would have had the same reaction by smelling my aunt's home made cinnamon coffee cake!

2 minutes ago, CharonY said:

As it turns out, at least one of the challenges that the information is actively getting diluted by bad info, and much time needs to be spent to vet information.

Who would have thought that having access to all the knowledge in the world through a small device you can carry around in your pocket would lead to so many people spending hours a day looking at pictures of cute cats! 

[MigL]

That's all right, Zap.
I'm usually a griping old man myself.

But what, exactly, is wrong with cute cats ???

[joigus]

I started out with similar books, although I wasn't fortunate enough to have such a big collection. I did use a general encyclopedia though.

My getting-started science books were (translated to English) Tell me what it is, and Tell me how it works. There you could find many interesting facts and explanations, from will o' the wisps to rocket dynamics, or planetary motion. From there I went to Russell and Eistein.

I prefer the internet, to be honest. The fact that you have to watch your step may actually be a good thing to develop your criteria.

[studiot]

It seems a pity that no one has mentioned direct interaction between (inspiring) people.

When I was around 11 plus age I wrote to Patrick Moore (not Sir, just plain in those days) about the greenhouse effect and ended up with a very illuminating and inspiring correspondence.

Edited June 30, 2021 by studiot