How Can We Encourage Scientific Thinking in Children?

[jack action]

I would be extremely interested to hear an argument that would convince hormone-filled teen-agers that knowing the electron shell structure is going to help them dig ditches or, for that matter, help said adolescent in their future dream professions of being the lead guitarist in a metal/goth/metalcore band or YouTuber.

The following quotes come from the earlier link I presented. It's about children learning to read, but it applies to humans learning anything.

1. For non-schooled children there is no critical period or best age for learning to read.

2. Motivated children can go from apparent non-reading to fluent reading very quickly.

3. Attempts to push reading can backfire.

4. Children learn to read when reading becomes, to them, a means to some valued end or ends.

It doesn't matter when you learn. It is never too late. One person I knew in high school (age 12-14) was the worst kid in school. Very bad behaviour. I lost contact with him (got expelled) and learn that he fell into the party crowd, involved in drugs and alcohol. After reaching the bottom of the barrel as an alcoholic, he opened his eyes at about 35 y.o., clean himself up and within a few years, he became the mayor of a 70 000 people town, managing a 100 millions $ budget. I think the eye opener for him was being responsible for his new born baby.

The people who don't want to learn, you don't teach them (I still agree with Dr. Courtney's post). Forcing someone to learn something that he or she doesn't see any purpose for it, often creates more problems than it solves.

That being said, it's not normal when a majority of people in a society fail to see what is (should be?) good for them. Especially when they are teens or even adults.

So to answer your question, there are no arguments to convince anyone to learn something. They have to come up with it by themselves.

 

[WWGD]

Sorry for necropost. One factor, I say, is that the massive and I think interesting infrastru ture underlying most aspects in modern society is hidden from plain sight. You see a piece of cheese nicely packaged in the supermarket so that the combination of logistics, supply chain, etc. needed to produce that piece of cheese is not apparent . So many are detached from the way different aspects of life come together to make modern life possible. I remember a story a friend told me, frustrated because his son would throw out food: "Why do you throw out food, where do you think it comes from?". The kid would reply: "The Supermarket". Basically, a lack of options for tinkering and seeing what's under the hood dulls the intellect and imagination by detaching people from the supporting infrastructure. I would bet many here interested in science have had the chance to tinker with PC s or other electronics or see a relative doing it. That is my take: we lose track of our inborn drive to tinker and figure out our world when we become detached from the wonders of our world.

 

[nomadreid]

WWGD: your principle that interconnections are hidden from kids (and the rest of the population) brings up the question as to how important interconnections are for developing scientific interest and/or ability.

[As a side note before going on: electronics are far from the only means to show interconnectivity -- after all, electronics is a recent addition to our reality. I saw one school that emphasized breaking down the compartmentalization of the curriculum as is usually done in schools -- mathematics class is separate from literature class, etc. They had a class make a garden and sell the produce: this ended up requiring mathematics, biology, botany, economics, government (yes, they filled in the necessary forms), and even physics. ]

Many good scientists are extremely narrow in their knowledge -- today's specialization rules out having many polymaths. Did they acquire their scientific interest by looking at interconnections, or by concentrating on the narrow details of one subject of interest? This is a real question, not a rhetorical question, as I do not know the answer -- but I suspect no one else does as well. Hence, while it is obviously desirable to show kids how things interconnect and to uncover all those hidden variables, I am not sure that one can conclude that there is a link between a child's realization that the cheese didn't just come from some laboratory in the back of the supermarket and her subsequent scientific interest.

 

[WWGD]

WWGD: your principle that interconnections are hidden from kids (and the rest of the population) brings up the question as to how important interconnections are for developing scientific interest and/or ability.

[As a side note before going on: electronics are far from the only means to show interconnectivity -- after all, electronics is a recent addition to our reality. I saw one school that emphasized breaking down the compartmentalization of the curriculum as is usually done in schools -- mathematics class is separate from literature class, etc. They had a class make a garden and sell the produce: this ended up requiring mathematics, biology, botany, economics, government (yes, they filled in the necessary forms), and even physics. ]

Many good scientists are extremely narrow in their knowledge -- today's specialization rules out having many polymaths. Did they acquire their scientific interest by looking at interconnections, or by concentrating on the narrow details of one subject of interest? This is a real question, not a rhetorical question, as I do not know the answer -- but I suspect no one else does as well. Hence, while it is obviously desirable to show kids how things interconnect and to uncover all those hidden variables, I am not sure that one can conclude that there is a link between a child's realization that the cheese didn't just come from some laboratory in the back of the supermarket and her subsequent scientific interest.

You're right, it's more of a sketch of an argument than a well fleshed out thesis. Edit : but it is about more than the interconnections, it is about being able to open up, access the black boxes around us. Too little complexity dulls, too much overwhelms.