Teaching material

[saevitas]

It is not a secret that the teaching of scientific lessons at schools is at a very low level. In my country, we're really advanced in mathematics, but in physics, we're hardly scientifically litterate; most of the students nowadays don't even know the Earth completes a revolution around itself every 24 hours or that we belong in the milky way galaxy. Actually, I'm not even sure the students know what a galaxy is.

 

From what I've heard from my friends from other countries, things are the same everywhere. Students learn the foil method in their senior year, astronomy doesn't even exist in schools and experiments is an unknown word.

 

Being scientifically litterate is important. If we all knew some basics of science, we'd understand why space exploration is important and we'd avoid the frauds of pseudoscience. But most importantly, we'd be able to understand the world around us.

 

So, I'd really like to hear your thoughts about the subject and beyond the theoretical aspect of the issue, I'd like to hear your ideas about how we can put this into practice.

[Big Tom]

The problem is hard to address. Like any social issue, the attitude of the parent and general population is likely to overthrow most attempts to encourage children. Like Mathematics, practical relevance is little understood, or soon forgotten upon graduation. I saw a speech by Brian Cox a few days ago in which he expressed my opinion quite well: the general population, including the most influential (politicians, monarchs) are science illiterate and view science as just ONE OF MANY industries, failing to the scientific method goes beyond academic Biology, physics etc. and has applications in any aspects of progress.

My honest view, and it isn't a popular one, nor is without ethical implications or its own issues, is to make compulsory science education more demanding and perhaps longer. The method should be drilled home. While english and analysis are important, the fact that science often takes a similar if not lower position beside a language class in secondary education is non-sensical. Then again, there is a tremendous issue with lack of education everywhere that is simply not acceptible in the western world in this day and age.

[EdEarl]

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.--Socrates

All ages have youth who are problems for parents and society. In time they grow older and have children who do the same. One cannot change human nature, of course, and even great men rarely change cultural traditions. Buddha, for example, has affected culture for several millennium. Otherwise, cultures change very slowly and often in very limited ways. Even the mayhem and misery of the American Civil War that ended slavery, which killed over 600,000 arguably had little effect on the culture.

 

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter may help make cultural changes easier, but many people resist change until an event or condition makes them want to change. At times when people are unhappy enough, there are usually competing ideas about how change should occur. Often these divergent opinions erupt into violence. Managing social change without violence is difficult, but possible. Gandhi and Martin Luther King did, with moderate success, but both were killed for their work.

 

I wish you luck.

[overtone]

make compulsory science education more demanding and perhaps longer. The method should be drilled home.

Increasing the duration and onerousness of the book-drill that is failing now will not, in my opinion, keep it from failing.

 

According to essentially every single successful scientist and science enthusiast on the record, what current science education lacks is not drill but play. For a variety of reasons from expense to liability, students are being - supposedly - "taught" about the physical world without being allowed to play with actual stuff.

 

If you never break, damage, set fire to, drill holes in, electrocute, launch into the air, drop from a height, mix unfortunately, kill and dissect, feed and nurture and train despite hazard, or otherwise ingage in destructive and risky behavior with anything, you aren't going to learn much science. But providing that kind of opportunity for students is both dangerous and expensive.

 

The other aspects of education that affect the learning of science - such as musical performance and theater, shop classes and gymnastics and serious grammar instruction - are of course being neglected as well. But we are educating a generation of "science students" whose teachers even - let alone themselves - cannot hook a battery up to a light bulb with confidence.

Edited August 5, 2013 by overtone

[Sato]

NY has a pretty good secondary school science education system, such that for all science courses there have a required 25 or so labs to be done. But it is still mainly for scoring well on the final state mandated exam, which is the problem. Especially when one who is doing well in some class could say "omg I hate name of science class." Lots of it is more so fact memorization that understanding; e.g. in my chemistry class the majority of my classmates treated every concept like a fact (in the form of a sentence or bullet point) that must be memorized, such as "electrons have greater energy when they're in a higher shell"; it was just that, and nobody seemed to have the idea of why that was true or any visual model of electrons with more energy (whatever "energy" was taught to be at that point) being able to stay or escape to different positions in the atom.