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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

>In school you do “experiments” and if the answer doesn’t match what is in the book you are marked down. Often you have to memorize a bunch of assertions or even simply names, without any epistemic context.

I don't know what school you went to, but this doesn't match my experience.

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It matches mine: A general chemistry lab where we were tasked to grow crystals and attempt to write formal reports of our scientific experiences. If experiences didn't match with current expected outcomes, we still recorded our observational data and tried hypothesizing on conditions of reason for divergent results.

There's the desire to teach the scientific method, and also the desire to convey the established literature in preparation for the (standardized) exams.

So, you design "labs" where the students "experiment."

This is my experience at a high school in Florida.

It might behoove you to think of these as exercises in "measurement" rather than "experiment"

The point is that’s now how it is framed by the school. So people grow up thinking there’s an absolute, precise, and “correct” answer and anything else is “wrong”

Agree. Saying "I dont know" at school is persecuted. And here we are. Everybody have opinions on everything and it is hard to hear "I don't know." in public space.

Imagine that politicans would say that they don't know anything.

A lot of people think that they know everything, but only few really know something.

It seems to depend very much on when and where you went to school.

I did Nuffield chemistry for A-Level, '72-'74. It was very much about learning experimental methods and how to analyse the results. Physics was similar with great emphasis on analysis. But in conversations with others at university afterward (Exeter uni, Physics) I discovered that many of my fellow students had endured exactly the situation that your quote mentions.

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