Our children, scientists
Last weekend, I had a chance to meet up with a former science communication student, who is now working on his master’s degree. He ran some of his prospective thesis ideas by me, which spanned topics in science pedagogy, the nature of science, and the process of textbook writing and approval.
As we discussed each topic, we kept coming back to the notion that the education system focuses so much on pushing facts rather than allowing students to appreciate the research process. Everything, then, looked like it was being force-fed to students who were assumed to be completely ignorant.
This was standing in the way of my student’s dream: to build education from the bottom-up, to have classrooms driven by discussions, students engaged in activities that they planned rather than were instructed to follow, and an environment where everyone takes joy in contributing to learning.
“Ma’am,” he asked, “Does this mean that our system is so fundamentally flawed because it relies on passing information?”
The short answer is yes. The current education system measures student success through the output they produce after being instructed and prompted. There is little space for students to demonstrate that they know how information came about, that they understand the process that led to the facts, that they see research as a way of thinking rather than a mere task to be carried out, that they appreciate the tentativeness of knowledge.
Without understanding that knowledge is tentative, students might not grow up to become adults who appreciate the long process of debates, trial and error, and discussions that lead to what is accepted as valid knowledge. Without this appreciation, students might not grow to be adults who also learn how to question knowledge, to debate and discuss on the basis of credible evidence, to navigate the byways of logic.
Without appreciating how science has inherent uncertainty, how findings depend on careful methods, and how science is constantly debated, students might simply see the field as a maker of facts—a black box where only outcomes are prized.
It is this tentativeness of knowledge and the preponderance of debate in science that make teaching challenging but only if one’s teaching philosophy is that of filling an empty vessel or writing new knowledge upon a blank slate.
Sadly, many of my students have reported going through high school science classes that were taught without regard for the processes of science and without allowing students to discuss what they had found. One student said his group was penalized when they didn’t get the expected results in their laboratory class, so they learned to alter the numbers in their findings, so that they matched what the teacher wanted them to achieve.
They had not learned science—they had learned how to please their teachers through fraud.
Another student reported that they had been made to create hypotheses without knowing what they were for, and even if the activity—wrongly called an experiment—did not call for it. Even my own nephew, 9 years old, is unabashed in talking about the futility of some of his recommended online quizzes.
In one such online quiz, he was supposed to be tested on insulators and conductors. The instructions: unscramble the letters to form a word corresponding to objects that are either insulators or conductors.
“I didn’t learn about why things are insulators or conductors!” he groaned, “This quiz is just teaching me how to spell!”
Even an elementary school student recognizes when science is treated as a mere fact machine and thereby badly assessed. Many students his age are actually the same: they cringe at anything claiming to be fun if it doesn’t teach them anything; they know when they’re being forced to learn information without knowing what it means in the real world; they want to learn.
In one of my graduate school readings, a researcher asked: Who are the best scientists?
The answer: children.
They aren’t afraid to be skeptical and question something new. They’re excited to pick up new ideas. They always ask how things work.
Somewhere along the way, their playfulness and creativity—the hallmarks of the scientific discipline!—are thwarted in favor of tests that screen for factual knowledge, lab reports judged based on findings, and a school milieu that focuses on what students produce rather than on who they are becoming.
Our system is fundamentally flawed because its top-down mechanism presupposes a blank, unseeing, ignorant child who cannot be trusted to think for themselves. Until we fix that system, we will always look too hard for endings rather than read through stories. We will always judge without first empathizing.
We cannot wail about people’s inability to change their minds in the face of new knowledge when they have been trained all their lives to conform and please. There is no citizenship in an education system designed to teach children only to echo and obey.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
