Hi everyone, I haven't seen any threads regarding this topic so please direct me if I've missed it. I have been looking at the state of scientific and mathematics education in the US and I wanted to start a discussion on what everyone believes the current state is, and what would provide for a better education for our students.
I have a problem with all of the politics that is played into science class. We have segmented "science" into multiple subjects with distinct areas of dominance when it is well understood that cross disciplinary understanding is essential for any kind of fundamental knowledge of a topic. More than that, the sciences have an agenda to teach a set curriculum of facts and figures from the sciences so that students can pass standardized tests.
They do this instead of asking students to use deductive logic to ask why the observed phenomena led to the formulation of the current theories and discovered facts. Science is not physics, or chemistry, or biology, or any of these subjects we teach. Science is observing the world in a way that permits no assumption to be unfounded, unacknowledged or unexplored, nothing more. It is a simple tool that provides amazing power. However that's not what the average high school student believes.
As someone (like most of us I imagine) who sat through a discussion on Linnaeus' binomial nomenclature and struggled to identify mussel organs from poor xerox copies I can understand why science "sucks" for so many people. There is science in everything, and the facts that the natural world have revealed to us are important to explore and understand in detail for sure, but they are not science. An art historian is a scientist when they examine new pieces, a jazz musician is a scientist when they use musical theory to analyze music, a writer is a scientist when they decide on what type of tone, format and syntax should be used for their audience.
I don't know if it is a fear of science that keeps it from being taught, or a general ignorance of its true meaning, but how can students be productively creative if they can't think critically about their innovations? I argue that it's necessary to spread the word and promote the education of critical thinking in every class, scientific investigation into every subject, and remove the stigma of technical difficulty that is associated with science. What do you think?
I have a problem with all of the politics that is played into science class. We have segmented "science" into multiple subjects with distinct areas of dominance when it is well understood that cross disciplinary understanding is essential for any kind of fundamental knowledge of a topic. More than that, the sciences have an agenda to teach a set curriculum of facts and figures from the sciences so that students can pass standardized tests.
They do this instead of asking students to use deductive logic to ask why the observed phenomena led to the formulation of the current theories and discovered facts. Science is not physics, or chemistry, or biology, or any of these subjects we teach. Science is observing the world in a way that permits no assumption to be unfounded, unacknowledged or unexplored, nothing more. It is a simple tool that provides amazing power. However that's not what the average high school student believes.
As someone (like most of us I imagine) who sat through a discussion on Linnaeus' binomial nomenclature and struggled to identify mussel organs from poor xerox copies I can understand why science "sucks" for so many people. There is science in everything, and the facts that the natural world have revealed to us are important to explore and understand in detail for sure, but they are not science. An art historian is a scientist when they examine new pieces, a jazz musician is a scientist when they use musical theory to analyze music, a writer is a scientist when they decide on what type of tone, format and syntax should be used for their audience.
I don't know if it is a fear of science that keeps it from being taught, or a general ignorance of its true meaning, but how can students be productively creative if they can't think critically about their innovations? I argue that it's necessary to spread the word and promote the education of critical thinking in every class, scientific investigation into every subject, and remove the stigma of technical difficulty that is associated with science. What do you think?
My religion is the understanding of my world. My god is the energy that underlies it all. My worship is my constant endeavor to unravel the mysteries of my religion. 
