Comment Well said, mod parent up; limits of "schooling" (Score 1) 470
Insightful post. James P. Hogan, a fan of true scientific inquiry, has some good fictional examples of this process in his "Giants" novels and some others (including his last).
I can ask if the scientific process as a skill (including critical thinking and assessment of intent as you put it) is learnable to any significant degree in the day-to-say environment for most of today's kids? So many kids are caught between forced schooling and entrancing but mostly passive media consumption, while they are also generally being fed crap nutritionally and essentially denied sunlight and exercise by all the demands and distractions.
From John Taylor Gatto from around 1991:
http://www.informationliberati...
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son's or daughter's education. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love -- and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television [[or now also computer games and the web etc.]] and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know."
I am, to some extent, a creation of highly-regulated 1960s and 1970s TV. There was not that much on of interest to kids, and much of what was on of interest to kids often either had a moral purpose (even cartoons or comedies/dramas like Yogi's Friends or Batman or Thunderbirds or the Andy Griffith Show) or was connected to scientific or cultural literacy (PBS, Sealab 2020, Wild Kingdom). The pacing was slower then, too, making it more feasible to, say, build with blocks while sort of half-following the screen. So, a limited amount of TV could be a boon even without much parental supervision -- while still leaving plenty of time with nothing interesting on TV to trigger boredom which lead to other things to do which lead to skills connected to science and engineering and citizenship, like in my case building with TogL's (somewhat like LEGO), electronics experiments or eventually computer programming, reading Isaac Asimov novels, playing with our dog, going outside with other kids on the street or a park, going to a summer day camp for sports and arts, or going to church on Sundays. Today's distracted and overwhelmed parents (typically both working full-time, if there even are two) have a much harder (perhaps impossible) job of navigating a complex media landscape for their kids -- even as they may also have a much broader range of good stuff than ever before (including, say. a classic like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood available on-demand on Amazon alongside an amazing range of scientific documentaries and pro-social media programs and movies). The latest Kindle Fire with parental controls on specifying kids' media is perhaps a step in the right direction there, as is the OLPC tablet and pre-selected educational content. There probably still is more room for innovation there. And doctors now recommend zero screen time for kids under two, and highly limiting it afterwards. Although, as with anything, it depends on exactly how it is used -- we homeschool/unschool, so screen time has a different meaning to us. (Disclaimer: I am currently working in the TV broadcast industry.)
And to talk about "pseudoscience", homework demands for many kids have also grown in many places into craziness (if homework was ever a good idea in the first place):
http://www.thecaseagainsthomew...
And much of the danger kids used to learn to deal with in the rest of their time from moving through the neighborhood on their own to experiments with full chemistry sets and so on is no longer allowed for most kids. So, it's hard to imagine where the next good general scientists are coming from in the USA, even ignoring that much of key US scientific advancement came from importing German scientists after WWII. I've heard NASA rocket scientists bemoan the trouble finding any young people with hands-on explosive experience like you used to get from farm kids and such. See also:
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever...
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_r...
http://richardlouv.com/books/l...
There are endless resources around that celebrate science and engineering and can be consumed in a passive way from "Mechanical Universe" to "The World of Chemistry" to "Myth Busters" to "Blue Planet" to "World's Toughest Fixes". But, where are today's kids going to have the open-ended hands-on experiences that might make them have a scientific outlook? Maybe the best hope for many is subtly-educational computer games involving a lot of trial and error and experiments? Things like Fantastic Contraption or various other physics games (just as one area)?
http://www.physicsgames.net/
In the 1990s, my wife and I tried to increase scientific literacy by spending seven or so person-years of our own time and money to create an open-ended free garden simulator:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...
Can't say there was much support for that kind of thing back then, or probably even now. And we ran out of money before we could make it even better, sadly. We then spent years digging out financially from that by working for others on unrelated stuff. People may talk about the need for STEM education, and there may even be a lot of money supposedly for it such as for related schooling programs, but since the US educational system is so broken, the money rarely can be spent on things that might make a significant difference. As Seymour Papert said about Lego/Logo, you can create an open ended system to teach inquiry, but as soon as you put it in schools full of bureaucracy and lesson plans and "learning objectives", the spirit of the thing gets crushed. Lego/Mindstoms at home remains an alternative though. Even today's Lego and FIRST robotics contests (a step forward in schools, true), by the nature of being contests, teach some problematical things...
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
Still, I can hope the internet is overall empowering more people to develop a healthy attitude to inquiry and skepticism (although I think we need better tools for that). Social media makes possible the rapid collective reflection on mainstream media (which indirectly guides it somewhat through rapid feedback). I'm also hopeful that there is a huge upside potential that HTML5 is making possible a whole new range of easily-accessible educational simulations powered by JavaScript (accessible by cheap smartphones and Chromebooks) -- it would be nice to see something better than our Garden Simulator as am HTML5 app. And self-produced instructional videos, say of MineCraft techniques, is a growing area of more peer-to-peer-level communications where a community is educating itself for free in a "unschooling" way. But all that is a very different world than I grew up in.