Tag: curiosity

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The Tragedy of Simple Science Illiteracy

I’m a science educator, but I’m not a big fan of promoting science as more important than the arts or any other subject matter area. I often cringe when I hear people talk about the importance of science literacy. But…. there comes a point, when I think, “wait a minute! Everybody should know this.”

Last evening, I took my dog as usual to the dog park. It was perfect timing. We arrived just before sunset and moon rise and the lunar eclipse. As I stood around talking with people about the impending eclipse, one woman, said, “but, where is the moon? It was way up here last night at this time.” I gasped silently, thinking that people had no clue how the whole Sun-Moon-Earth system worked. Yes, it does confuse people, but if you just observe the sky a little bit, you can figure out a lot of things.

At the same time, I found it pretty cool to watch the 1/3 blocked moon rise above the horizon. And, from the vantage point of the Phoenix dog park, one could see the moon move upwards. We don’t usually see the movement so clearly. But, with buildings and other structures on the horizon, it provided a foreground that made the movement very obvious. I went up to a group and excitedly pointed out this observation, which was met with something less than a ho-hum shrug.

When I was teaching elementary science teaching methods the vast majority of students had no clue how the Sun-Moon-Earth system worked. So, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise. But, for some reason, I thought that older adults would know or should know. But, we’ve destroyed our relationship to science… and to knowing for that matter. We really do not seem to value knowledge and understanding. People like the eclipse for the “magic show” quality, but not for the actual science of what’s happening.

My students and future teachers seemed to care less about how things worked. They cheated on their moon studies, which asked them to observe the moon for 5 minutes a night and record their observation and reactions. I told them, I didn’t care about “right answers,” but I did want them to struggle with trying to figure out explanations for the observations they made. But, too many years of schooling had damaged them. They had to look up information and make it sound like they had made the observations. I could tell they cheated, because they said they saw the moon when we had heavy snow storms and no visibility. Or, they did really poorly by just making up things without looking it up, in which cases nothing made any sense at all.

It really isn’t all that important to our survival that we understand how the Earth-Moon-Sun system works at this point. Maybe if we have to return to living without technology, it will be more important, but for now it isn’t. But, it just seems odd, that people have no curiosity about how the world around them works. It seems odd that people don’t look at things in the world. People don’t ask questions. They don’t try to explain anything. It’s just downright strange.

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Children as Real People and Engaged Learners, but Schools Get in the Way

I mention in my book, Creating a Classroom Community of Young Scientists (2nd ed.), that “children are people.” Although this may seem obvious, the “institution” of schooling assumes that children are something less than human. In fact, children (as emotional, thinking, creative, and curious human beings) are totally missing in The No Child Left Behind Act. Children are merely pawns in the politics of education.

Fundamentally, humans are born as learning beings. From the moment children are born, they start exploring and making sense of the world. They learn one of the most abstract “things” we ever learn (i.e., language or languages) and do so within the first few years and with no real “instruction.” They come up with all kinds of explanations about the world (many of them are amazingly complex, but might make natural and social scientists cringe).

Children’s curiosity almost seems like a basic need. They crave learning  new things. Certainly from a biological point of view, curiosity leads to learning and learning provides human beings with tools for survival. For parents, the concern is always to what extent can you let children pursue their curiosity? If they curiously explore an electrical socket or a cabinet full of chemicals, they could end up getting seriously injured or worse. However, some parents seem to limit children’s exploration around all kinds of personal issues, like “not wanting to be bothered,” “too noisy,” etc. Then, of course, despite the best intentions of parents, they go to school. In most cases, school is the death nell for the spirit of children, which is filled with wonder and curiosity, intriguing ways of making sense of things, an innate cheerfulness, amazing imagination, and an excitement for learning. Schools immediately try to “control” children and make them conform to some adult standard of behavior. They limit or destroy their imaginations and curiosity. They deaden the very process of learning. It becomes the drill and practice march into stupefication. No more excitement for learning, no imaginative play, no more curiosity, no more exploration — just boredom. I’ve seen this happen to my own children, despite our best efforts keep them excited and curious.

Children are capable of so much more than No Child Left Behind will ever allow them do. Then we test them repeatedly for days on end. And, not only do we test them, but we drill and kill them for months in preparing for the tests. It’s a psychological act of violence that parents should be standing up to and saying “no more!”

If we really think hard about what is important for children, we might find that what schools are doing is just the opposite. Of course, there are many amazing teachers, who work very hard at helping children grow in ways that keep the excitement for learning alive, but they fight an uphill battle against their administrators, other teachers, and parents. It is extremely hard for teachers, especially new teachers who may enter the professional with the right kind of ideals, to pursue the kinds of approaches to teaching and learning that will actually benefit children. Such approaches see children as the producers of knowledge rather than the consumers of knowledge. Children explore, investigate, and generate explanations for what they have found. This what they do naturally. Teachers just need to help them refine these skills, challenge them to go to new heights, support them in whatever ways possible, and take peaks at new perspectives and possibilities.

Gregory Bateson (anthropologist, biologist, a thinker way ahead of his time, and one time husband of Margaret Mead) said there were three ways people can find the limits of the possible: (a) exploration (try out new things, see where one can go, etc.), (b) play (fantasy play, “what-if” play, pretending, experimenting, etc.), and (c) crime (breaking the official and unofficial rules, not conforming to the status quo, etc.). If we think about famous people who have made significant contributions to society through writing, science, the arts, etc., have these people engaged in any of these three ways of pushing the limits? Do children engage in any of these before entering school? What do schools do when children engage in these?

[* Thanks to Lisa Smith for her painting of the unicorn frog © 1976]

(originally published June 28, 2008)

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In the Heartlessland of America

Sometimes we get so caught up in the speed of everyday life, we don’t take the time to ponder what’s happening around us. As for me, I feel like I’ve been going about my everyday business with blinders on. It’s embarrassing. I feel like I’m extremely slow on the uptake.

Maybe this time too many things happened on too many fronts to ignore the message:

Our society is becoming increasingly heartless.

It’s becoming so bad, I cringe when I listen to the radio, watch TV news, or pick up a newspaper. But, it doesn’t stop there. Events at work and encounters with a variety of people all demonstrate a huge disconnect with heart… with our basic humanity.

As a golfer I’ve followed and admired Tiger Woods. Now, he’s been crucified. A simple story on his screw-up would have sufficed, but the drive for headlines, money, and recognition, reporters have lost their hearts and lynched Tiger for their own benefit. Of course, the same sort of lynching took place with President Clinton, but not so much with the governor of South Carolina and the many others who have made some sort of “social transgression.”

Buddhists have a slogan, which goes something like this:

“don’t seek benefit from the misfortunes of others.”

This slogan has to do with how we can practice being compassionate or how we can practice living with heart. I wonder how many of these same journalists have had affairs or have acted in ways that may have been inappropriate, hurtful, or unethical?

At work, many of my colleagues were becoming increasingly alarmed and worried about one our colleagues. He wasn’t showing up to teach classes, wasn’t turning in final grades, and became impossible to contact. Then, the administration stepped in and fired him. When some colleagues pleaded to have him put on sick-leave and to get him help, the response was basically “we’re following policy.” As we found out later, he was suffering from severe depression and the medications were adversely affecting him. His wife (from a very different culture and with little English language ability) could not advocate for him. He, his wife, and his children are now without income and health benefits. How does “policy” address the needs of human beings? In this dramatic case, five people were treated with heartlessness and damaged in ways we have yet to see.

At the scale of our government and probably more significantly at the scale of corporations, we see huge collections of heartless people running the show. These people make decisions and take actions based on self-interest, money, and power, not for the good of people struggling to survive in an increasingly complex and challenging world. In fact, the policies created to run a society or corporation serve mostly to decrease flexibility in dealing with individual human beings. “Zero tolerance,” “cell phone service contracts,” “disclaimers,” “photo radar,” “Roberts rules of order,” and the millions of others all serve to create a rigidity that doesn’t allow for exceptions or for individual circumstances. It’s the “letter of the law,” not the “spirit of the law.” Neither the individual nor the society as a whole is valued. Only the “good” of the rich and powerful is considered.

This neglect of the individual and of the society has resulted in our inability to care for our poor and sick, for our children, and for our elderly. This neglect also has produced an education system that serves as political capital for leaders at all levels of scale, yet fails to meet the needs of most of its students. Even those who score well on tests are left without self-confidence and feelings of self-worth, without essential social skills, without abilities to think deeply and critically, and with little if any creativity. From a very early age, children adeptly observe and learn about social interactions. They are tremendously curious and think in surprisingly complex ways, while being unboundedly creative. By the time they reach grade 6, their self-confidence, social skills, curiosity, complex thinking, and creativity have been reduced to little more than memories of the adults who knew these children 6 years earlier. By this time, heartlessness has begun to take root, as modeled by a system of schooling steeped in heartlessness within a society without heart.

We care more about the “material goods” than about human beings. These “material” goods range from the ephemeral, such as test scores, achievement, power, our own self-images and desires, stock market “indices,” and ratings and statistics of all kinds, to the more concrete but “immaterial,” such as money, houses, cars, and goods of all kinds. In this materialistic world, there is no room for making connections to oneself, to others, to the delicate environment in which we live, and to the wonderful world of ideas.

(originally published December 30, 2009)