U.S. Should Adopt Higher Standards for Science Education
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
1. There are still places in the US where our _current_ standards are world class ( boston is given as an example )
2. This quote """ The first draft, released in May, explicitly included evolution and climate change. A second draft will be available for comment this fall. """
Why, why as your drafting standards for something that could help all americans do you intentionally politicise it. You have now turned this from something everyone would agree with ( We need to educate our children better ) to something that people will draw up battle lines off of. I understand that people see the denayal of these two aspects as a marker of an anti-science mindset, but the solution is not to just draw the line in the sand and use the tynnary of the majority as a hammer to force your changes through.
Prediction, this will turn political and nothing profitable will get done and a majority of america will continue to see its education standards fall.
PS: Biology is so closely tied to evolution at this point that I can't help but wonder what's left once you discard it. Global warming is less important, but it's rather hard to avoid that topic for 12 years.
Also this idea that science is underpinned by evolution and cliement science is laughable. I guess chemestry and physics don't count ?
But except for the wastage I'm not concerned. I don't want my kids focusing too much on chemistry or physics in school anyway. There are few jobs in those types of science and plenty of competition for those jobs, so it's only entertainment value for my kids. I'd like the schools to focus on Python and web development first. That's not going to happen, of course, so it's Codecademy and similar sites to fill the gap.
Or bioinfomatics or computational biology, where they're understanding current biology, not engineering new stuff?
You've discarded all of fundamental science, in favour of teaching your kids programming. Programming's important, but a physics degree _definitely_ teaches programming along with _how the universe works_. And stats. Lots and lots of stats. ",)
I'm just saying; you come across as a little short sighted, here.
I'd like schools to favor programming over physics and chemistry, but not ignore physics and chemistry altogether.
If you don't know physics, you don't know why there are fundamental limits to Moore's Law that we are rapidly approaching, for an example.
Nowadays physics is a hobby of mine, having entertainment value only. I can fully appreciate that "[physics] runs the shit..." but that doesn't pay the bills or get me to retirement.
Bully for you. But it's the idea of prioritizing what is essentially a technician's job (yes, we call ourselves engineers; in reality, most of us are craftsmen) over knowing how the world works, and having some of the mental tools to figure stuff out that's confusing me.
Also, physics really rubbed in abstraction as a concept: "here's the atom, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it. Then this discovery was made. Here's the nucleus, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it..."
How are we going to treat debilitating diseases that plague much of the world, in a cost-effective manner?
How are we going to improve the quality of life for all the people who are living longer lives?
How might we address unforeseen medical and nutritional crises?
You have a very short-sighted attitude. Which is not to even mention the impact that tying your approval of your children to the field in which they choose to work will have on them.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation#Projections_of_...)
With a population significantly less than today's level, biotech isn't really needed. Without modern biotech people can live to be 80+ on average. That's good enough in my book. I support death (even my own, at 80+!), to keep the population fresh and keep the dictators dying. Overall, I'm confident the benefits of no biotech outweigh the negatives.
I don't think I could help being disappointed if a kid of mine chose to work in a job that did great harm to others, be it cigarettes or GMO food. That's kind of natural to feel that way.
Death doesn't really need your support, although it might appreciate the fanbase as it is usually not that popular on the whole, apart from with goths, although it tends to find them a bit embarrassing.
Then you will be really annoyed when you work out what viruses get up to all on their own. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending important topics like evolution and climate change don't exist seems worse.
PS: And no I am not kidding, if you actually understand why a mass spectrometer works then climate change is obvious.
It's purely the words "climate change" that they'll attack. And picking that fight is not a winning solution.
The winning solution is to show children how awesome science is, give them the fundamental tools to participate in it, and let them see for themselves the validity of conclusions like climate change.
We're in the mess we're in because too many people's science education was purely focussed on the conclusions of science without the methods of science. When "science class" means memorizing facts it's no different than catechism, and truth becomes a question of one authority vs another.
The conclusions of science are of secondary importance to the process of science.
Please elaborate.
The societies that learn how to be competitive without contributing to climate change will leapfrog every single other society in technology and wellbeing.
This is absurdly myopic. Evolution affects not just all the life-sciences, but also the mathematics of evolution is finding new applications in software and engineering all the time.
Which leaves Anatomy and Cellular biology, but again only when looking at individual species. Even just showing the 'fish' like stage of a human embryo brings up rather difficult questions without evolutionary context. As is a lot of the stranger parts of Anatomy and Cellular biology.
PS: By 'fish' I mean when you basically have head + spine and before leg's show up.
Besides, the people who are opposed to teaching evolution and/or climate science are going to take a microscope to any new science teaching standard, so we may as well be up front about the goals and get the fight over with at the frontend.
Too many scientifically-minded people ignore this reality and cling to the idealistic notion that schools will teach the best ideas, so we simply need to show our ideas are best. No. Schools are politically controlled and will teach what political power dictates.
So long as scientifically literate people think we're above politics, we'll keep losing.
(Personally, I'd rather continue to see a growing number of people empowered to opt out of politically controlled education entirely.)
Also, to insist on evolution and climate science to be taught in a way that practitioners in those disciplines would at least recognise, is not pretending to be above politics, it is trying to meet the politics head on.
Just because certain religions or political parties try to deny facts does not mean that scientists and engineers can pretend that the truth is something other than what it is.
The theory of gravity has put people on the Moon and a rover on Mars. The theory of evolution creates plausible scenarios of why we see what we see.
There's much politics in the plausibility part. And there's a lot of politics in putting gravity and evolution on the same shelf.
It's sad to see how someone, even scientists, are considered to be anti-science for even doubting evolution.
There are no viable alternative scientific models that compete with the theory of evolution in terms of explaining change across successive generations of biological organisms. There are theological models, but those by definition do not have any scientific evidence. Which is why doubting evolution is considered anti-scientific - rightly so, in my opinion.
The amount of hard evidence we have for the theory of evolution is so overwhelming at this point that doubting it has two possible reasons: the person either does not understand science in general and evolution in particular, or they are driven by a religious agenda. Incidentally, both of these are very common in America due to shoddy science education (esp. with regards to imparting critical thinking skills in children) and the influence of religion in politics (and therefore education).
But _a priori_ we can not impose any restrictions on what will explain something. We are part of what exists. We can have no expectation on what exists, why and how it works.
Some things may have a scientific explanation, some others may not. We don't get to decide. We can't restrict ourself to accepting only one kind of explanation.
There isn't always 2 sides to every story. Sometimes there's 1.
Where we have gone wrong is that school systems are saddled with far too many non-teaching positions and new school buildings tend way too many times to be symbols of the politicians who had them built.
Non-teaching positions are the results of regulations and laws to 'protect' the interests of students. Until someone makes hard decisions that pare back some of those mandated 'services' they're not going to go away.
You bring up an interesting data point. I wasn't even aware there were states with no teachers unions, that is a bit surprising. Do you know which ones? Without looking up the states and the stats, I'll take your word for it. I have no expectation that labor unions increase or decrease teaching quality, so if true as we'll assume, this is not particularly surprising.
I would expect, though I haven't checked, that these areas with teachers unions have better pay and benefits for teachers. Is that true, from the data you have analyzed?
There's so much incredible bureaucracy. So much. Unimaginable. Federal, state, local. School districts have centralized to the point that it's nearly impossible to implement changes unless it's some sort of "one size fits all" scheme. Local schools are hamstrung by work rules, union rules, tenure rules, and then on top of that state and local education "standards."
Then there are socio-economic issues. Parents who themselves never learned to read. Kids living in areas where the person to look up to is a drug dealer. Cultures of dependence and reliance on government handouts. Many (if not most) urban school districts have dropout rates of over 50%.
Even where there is not that sort of culture, there are parents who think that the schools are babysitters and any kid who does something wrong much have done so because it's the <i>school's</i> fault.
And of course, teachers unions, licensing rules, pay scales, and lack of individual accountability contribute as well.
It's such an enormous problem that there's no single answer. I think that decentralizing education would go a long way toward helping to spur innovation. Charter schools, vouchers, and removing attendance boundaries help too.
Centralization has really hurt education and the only answer that seems to be proposed is <i>more centralization.</i>
I'm sorry but, using my mother as an example, in a single year, my mother elevated inner-city students in English from very low scores to very high scores. I'd need to ask her for specifics; but, the change was incredible. I believe they were getting near highest marks in the area. She demanded a LOT from the students, a truly incredible amount of writing and work. She was very, very hard on her students; but at the same time rewarded achievement greatly and taught in an effective, repetitive way. Years down the road, her old students have repeatedly come back to her, thanking her for her work with them. It is all about the teachers.
If people are sufficiently interested in her method, I might be able to get her to log in to my account (or one of her own), and expound upon her methods of training and relating to the children.
Since I haven't seen many willing parents (indeed in some situations, the parent isn't a positive or even present factor at all), I've only raised up the factor that I've actually seen make a positive change. It's actually the same way for me with computer science. A good first introduction made all the difference in the world.
Guys. Do me a favor; if this is the solution, leave education broken. I'm serious, I'm amazed I haven't already burned out on school work. Even a little bit more and I probably would have by now.
I put crowdsourced in quotes because it needs to be done carefully. We need a body of standards that is subject to continuous improvement by subject-matter experts, and expert teachers. It needs to be set up so that popular opinions can be expressed, but simple votes do not override expert conclusions.
This body of standards should be mapped to each state's standards. Teachers could work from the crowdsourced standards, but fulfill reporting requirements on their state standards. This is what good teachers in states with poor standards do anyways. Teachers work from a set of high-quality standards, but report on their own state's standards.