Recently we've taken another look at the Science curriculum, and found that it didn't go far enough for my physicist husband. Here's some of his thoughts on the subject:
Education is not the accumulation of facts, but learning to think.
- Empiricism is at the heart of the scientific method.
- There may be many areas of human knowledge that are not empirical, but they cannot be classified as science. (e.g. we have no absolute scale on which we can measure, say, 'beauty'.)
- So in many ways 'science' is only concerned with a fairly small chunk of human experience - that which can be measured and quantified.
- Another key value for a scientist is the concept of 'falsifiability.' In short, any hypothesis that I come up with is only valuable if I can also propose an experiment that would disprove it. If I propose "All swans are white", then I can then add "and seeing a black swan would disprove this hypothesis.". Hypotheses that withstand rigorous testing may be upgraded to 'theories.'
- If we're going to teach our kids science, then first and foremost we need to teach them to be good empiricists, and to know the tools of measurement, to be familiar with the ruler, the clock, the scales, the thermometer, the voltmeter.
- Science also expects repeatability - if I measure the length of a piece of string and you measure it too, our answers should agree. If they don't, then something is wrong.
- A good scientist must hold on to a healthy degree of humility, because no matter how cherished his beliefs, a single experiment, or even a few lines of math, may prove him wrong. In 2004, Steven Hawking made the headlines for reversing a position he'd held strongly for 30 years, and lost a bet with a friend in the process. Interestingly, it was his own work that had disproved his earlier position!
- Summary: Teach our kids how to measure. Teach them how to test ideas. Teach them how to distinguish between testable and non-testable hypotheses. Science education cannot be about 'this is true because I say so,' or 'this is true because the textbook says so,' but 'this is true because we can observe and test it.'
