Pediatric Environmentalism

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/16/science-education-environment-opinions-contributors-henry-i-miller_print.html

by DanielBMarkham • 16 years ago

19 8 16 years ago

lutorm• 16 years ago

"Too often the objective of student projects seems to be "empowering" the kids and giving them a feeling of accomplishment instead of getting the right answer and learning scientific principles."

I would argue that these two goals are not mutually exclusive. If all you do is teaching kids the right answer, which is largely what schools do, then you end up exactly where we are today, where kids largely don't feel like science is about investigation at all but just about rote memorization of facts.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

Yeah, to me the biggest thing that got me interested in science was stuff outside of school (science museums, computer tinkering) that got me engaged in the idea of empirical problem-solving. I think a lot of people learning / failing to learn technical subjects feel totally disconnected from why the stuff they're learning even exists, or how they could possibly come up with anything like it: more like gospel truth than something you could possibly do yourself.

I'm not sure it'd work for everyone, but I found science much more interesting once I started approaching it from a historical perspective, reading original papers, biographies, accounts of controversies, etc. It's pretty clear when you approach it that way that all the various abstractions, models, etc. were invented by real people to solve actual problems (whether practical or theoretical). It also makes it more clear how you would approach things as a scientist when you figure out how the existing content of science got there.

I also sort of dislike the didactic teaching of "scientific principles". Giving kids a Seven Laws of Scientific Method to memorize or something is kind of lame, and a lot less believable than trying to show them why some methods of empirical discovery are better than others, i.e. if they want to learn something about a phenomenon, how they might go about doing so. Science is supposed to be a way to help you learn about the world, not something scientists do just because their journals say so.

(A heavy-handed focus on Scientific Method also risks getting into territory scientists don't actually agree on. Are you a scientific realist or an instrumentalist? A falsificationist or probabilistic verificationist? Etc.)

jerf• 16 years ago

I would argue that nobody said they are exclusive, and diving down that mental path is a great way to end up talking yourself into a position in which you have justified to yourself that it's OK to lie about the science if it leads to Right Thinking.

Facts are a prerequisite to true learning. They are necessary to jumpstart the autodidact process. If you give up on them at the beginning, the children will notice, and you will end up with neither the autodidacts we desire nor people who even understand basic facts through rote memorization. Teaching children to investigate without giving them the proper basis of facts will result in them "investigating" up some homeopathy or astrology or other such things. Or stupid theories about electromagnetic OMGRadiation!!1! killz beez! (OMGRadiation!!1! being my personal pet name for the usual concept of radiation that people have hammered in them by Hollywood.)

False environmental consciousness isn't even a virtue. It's cute to see schoolchildren worry about the bees dying due to cell phone towers. It's somewhat less cute when they're still worried about that at voting ages. You get the double-whammy of them wasting economic resources trying to deal with a false threat posed by cell phone towers while the real threat goes unaddressed.

patio11• 16 years ago

False environmental consciousness isn't even a virtue.

See also: DDT, GMO, vaccines, and irradiation in the context of food safety. I really don't care if recycling becomes a secular religion even if it is a net waste of energy, but deeply held beliefs about the above four kill people.

anamax• 16 years ago

They may not be mutally exclusive, but is '"empowering" the kids and giving them a feeling of accomplishment' worth doing?

Which of the two do you think gets higher priority?

matthewsimon• 16 years ago

Oh my god -- a class of fifth graders in 2009 wasn't aware of two relevant scientific papers published in 2008?

The only way to explain these pre-teen children's ignorance of this knowledge is that there's a conspiracy dedicated to hiding the facts from them!

No, in practice eleven-year-old kids usually aren't reading the current scientific literature -- they're learning from their teachers and reading texts that have been written for students, and it's not surprising that it takes a few years for new information to permeate the educational system.

I understand the concern the piece is raising, but surely there are better examples than that, right?

MichaelGG• 16 years ago

I thought the article was quite clear on this. The more important point is: _Probable causes? In fact, there's no scientific evidence that cellphones, pesticides, global warming or the alleged insufficiency of wildflowers are linked in any way to CCD._

Not knowing recent research on it might be fine. Maybe the articles were in Spanish and hard to find or something. But if the lesson ended up with kids getting concerned and writing letters, and they say "yea we're not sure, it could be some stuff that's unrelated", that sounds like a missed learning opportunity, maybe.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

I don't think the kids are doing too badly on that one, though, because you'd get results not entirely dissimilar if you polled working biologists. CCD is a particularly tricky example because everyone agrees that something is happening, but no causes have proven links. Yet there presumably is some cause or set of causes, so scientists differ in their hypotheses as to what those causes might be. I suspect if you were to poll, you'd find that very few think a link to cell-phone towers is probable, but quite a few think a link to pesticides is probable.

Pediatric Environmentalism

Related Stories