We're not teaching our children "real science"

And we're paying a HUGE price!

We dance ‘round in a ring and suppose ... but the Secret sits in the middle and knows.   — Robert Frost

Most of us think we’re pretty smart. You've probably heard the following comments:

• We cured polio/smallpox

• We put a man on the moon

• We cracked the atom

• We decoded the genome

• We ... We ... We ...

What do they mean "WE"? No, these great accomplishments are the product of a very small number of very talented diligent scientists and engineers, and the rest of us just use and benefit from their discoveries. Let's give credit where credit is due!

It’s the TRUTH! Believe me!

There are several pathways we use to to discover the "truth":

• "common sense" (looks like …)

• conventional "wisdom" (people are saying ...)

• authority (might makes right)

• science (prove it!)

The first three methods are susceptible to the mental errors we humans are prone to make and that are the root cause of many of our failures. We become enthralled by our own ideas, beliefs, theories, assumptions and opinions because these mental creations make us feel good (safe, in control, smart, virtuous) and serve our interests and we become, well, addicted to them. Problem is, we rarely bother to find out if they have any relationship to "reality" or the "truth".

If we never test the validity of our ideas and beliefs, it's impossible to learn anything new. If we take our assumptions on "faith", we will keep using the same ones over and over. And if our beliefs are in fact "wrong", we'll keep making the same mistakes over and over and over.

Science makes it hard(er) to hold on to bad ideas over the long run.

Teaching science

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. — Abraham Lincoln

I have written about how we humans FAIL to solve our problems by relying too much on untested theories and beliefs and assumptions, and I’ve suggested a better way to succeed by using the methods of science/experimentation to discover how things actually work.

If we want all the benefits of science, we need to educate more people about the real work of science/scientists. Demonstrating how science enables us to solve many of our most important problems should be a core requirement of every public education system. Society benefits from a citizenry that can generate new knowledge and critically evaluate the claims and opinions of others.

In addition to teaching basic science literacy to every student, we need to replace the scientists from the previous generation as they age out of their careers. We need a large cadre of scientists in the 25-50 years old range which is the sweet spot for making big breakthrough discoveries. Most Nobel prize winners are honored for work they did during that incredibly fertile period when they are still open and creative enough to see things anew and differently than the conventional wisdom dictates.

So the EDUCATION of young scientists is incredibly important for the survival and well-being of our species and the world as  a whole. To develop an effective method/pedagogy for teaching science to each generation of citizens, we must ask and answer the following critical questions:

• WHAT is science?

• WHY should we teach science?

• HOW should we teach science?

WHAT is science?

Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. -- Atul Gawande

For most of human history, it was believed that one could discover the truth through divine revelation or philosophical reasoning. It wasn’t until the second century CE that seekers of the truth (referred to as natural philosophers) such as Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965-1039) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) began to promote and engage in the scientific method of disciplined observation and ultimately controlled experimentation. This new paradigm triggered an explosion of the gathering/cataloguing of things and facts and data (explore the  tree of life for a beautiful example). 

If you have no data, you're just another person with an opinion — W. Edward Deming

The creative work of science diligently iterates through the following critical steps and stages:

• Gathering and organizing data ("facts") based on direct sensory observation

• considering how the data might inter- and co-relate; imagining the natural mechanisms that might account for those relationships

• developing hypotheses about those mechanisms that can be tested by experimentation

• conducting those experiments within a highly structured research protocol

• analyzing the experiment's results using appropriate statistical methods to control for sources of error/randomness and determine confidence levels for accepting the results as “true” (or not)

• Refining the hypotheses based on those results

• designing and conducting further experiments to test the continuously modified hypotheses

• building theories that "make sense" of the array of results from multiple converging experiments

• testing the theories by further hypothesis building and testing

• Rinse and repeat

But if you ask high school and even college students what SCIENCE is, they will mostly tell you about the RESULTS of the work by scientists they read about in their text books. In most pre-university settings, science is not taught as a process/method for discovering the "truth", but rather as a collection of established "facts". So what students are taught is a "bible" (scripture created by a scientific priesthood) that is to be taken on faith and not questioned because, after all, it's "science".

Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated. — Steven Pinker

So K-12 students don't learn the fundamental attitude of science: SKEPTICISM. Rather than taking something on faith or just because someone famous or in authority or in your tribe says it's true, science prescribes a skeptical "Prove It!" attitude. And proof is built via the experimental method above (gathering and organizing data, testing hypotheses, building theories etc.) that is designed to reduce the number of FALSE explanations for the results of the experiment. 

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only ... remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day. In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar. — Richard Feynman

Skepticism requires the ability to live with uncertainty and not knowing for a while. It requires that a lot of work be done before coming to a conclusion. It requires delay of gratification, eating your vegetables (observing, doing the research) before having dessert (Eureka!). It takes more energy to be skeptical than to be either a believer or a cynic. Most people are not skeptics, and most science teachers are not scientists, and so science is usually taught as if it was a dry collection of "facts". End of story, end of questioning, end of science.

WHY should we teach science?

To a frog sitting at the bottom of a well, the sky looks as big as the lid of a pot. — Vietnamese proverb

The world is a complicated and dangerous place, and humans and other beings have evolved to cope with that reality. The good news is that there is evidence that over the past few centuries, the life of the "average" human has gotten "better" (for other organisms, not so much) on a variety of economic and health indicators. How can we understand the root causes of these positive trends and even accelerate them?

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NOTE: If you're thinking like a good scientist/skeptic, you should be saying to yourself "I'm not sure I believe things are getting better. PROVE IT!" For data supporting the "getting better" hypothesis, see

• Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now! and The better angels of our nature

• Hans Rosling, Factfulness

• Hans Rosling's TedX presentation about global health trends

There is a fruitful debate about whether the economic and health data on which the "things are getting better" argument is based tells the whole story about the last century of human history. Question: is a rural Chinese farmer who moves to work/live in an urban megafactory and makes more money "better off" than when they were living in an intact village/community working outdoors?]

Now back to our story …

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"The Enlightenment" (c. 1650-1800) refers to a period when a new paradigm began to challenge the supremacy of power/wealth and religion in directing human affairs. That new paradigm was built upon three core values and practices:

• Reason (elevation of logic over belief/superstition)

• Science (elevation of skepticism over faith)

• Humanity (elevation of the well-being of all people over the interests of religion and concentrated wealth/commerce)

Much of our current health, wealth, wisdom and happiness (unequally distributed as it is) is built upon these Enlightenment values and the diligent work of their advocates and disciples:

• the scientists who create new knowledge

• the public-, medical-  and social/behavioral-health professionals who translate (albeit imperfectly) that knowledge into practice and service

• the members of the public and private sectors whose work is illuminated by reason, science and humanity

We all benefit every day from their diligent intelligent effort. So we should want MORE scientists. So we should teach real science to EVERY student as a means of discovering the truth and benefitting every person and the entire planet.

HOW should we teach science?

People learn best by working with other people on projects that really matter. — Jeff Mulgan

An effective paradigm for the teaching of science should align with the stage of cognitive development of each student. For example, young children (ages 3-7) are masters of observation and collecting. They love to immerse themselves in the physical world around them through their acute senses, undistracted by the thinking/verbal skills that come on-line a bit later in life.

They are  natural hoarders of things like insects (farewell E.O. Wilson!), seeds, rocks, beanie babies, books, action figures etc. They want to complete the WHOLE collection and will find/buy all #X things to do so (the marketers capitalize on that instinct to sell more product). They like to arrange their collections into categories by color, size and other sense variables. So they are naturals for the first stage of the scientific method: observation and data gathering. In Finland, science in the early grades involves field trips in and outside the school building to inspect all manner of natural phenomena.

Is this "simple" observing and collecting and organizing of things really "science"? Consider the following:

• Charles Darwin spent 5 years as a naturalist on the ship HMS Beagle gathering plant and animal samples from many parts of the world, and the next 23 years cataloguing and pondering his finds before advancing his theory of "descent by natural selection" (evolution) to account for the variation between and within  species. 

• Alexander von Humboldt, often referred to as the father of ecology, traveled around the world for 5 years taking numerous climate measurements and gathering thousands of samples, and then spent the next 21 years publishing multiple volumes based on that data trove. 

• Gregor Mendel patiently cross-bred thousands of generations of peas for more than 7 years to create the data base from which he advanced the first valid theory of inheritance and genetics.

So yes, great science begins with painstaking observation and cataloging of data with minimal hypothesizing or theory building. Those important activities come later (in both science and in human development) and they require a different kind of brain/cognitive functioning.

Jean Piaget distinguishes between what he calls "concrete" mental operations that occur largely in the sensorimotor realm (like observing and manipulating things) and "formal" mental operations that involve language and symbols and logic/reasoning. Young children are very good at concrete operations, and when they advance to formal operations thinking, they actually lose some of their observational competence. This is why we adults have to be taught "mindfulness" (observing the world through our senses without thinking or judging) because we have become "addicted" to our formal operations, for better and worse.

(People) who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations. Of necessity, they observe with a preconceived idea, and when they devise an experiment, they can see, in its results, only a confirmation of their theory. In this way they distort observation and often neglect very important facts because they do not further their aim. -- Claude Bernard

As children and their mental capacity grow across the K-12 years, other cognitively appropriate aspects of science can be brought into the curriculum. Every student becomes a crime scene investigator or forensic specialist as they engage in a fun and exciting "Search for the TRUTH!" Once they gather data on for instance the number of bacteria on desks in 10 classrooms, they can speculate (hypothesize) about the "causes" of any differences (number of students, age of students, location of classrooms, cleaning solutions used etc etc) and then conduct experiments to find the truth.

As their math skills grow, they can be introduced to measures of central tendency (averages) and variation, and eventually to probability statistics (a means for deciding how confident we should be that something is true). These skills will not only teach students about the scientific method, but also equip them to critically read research articles as adults to decide for example whether a drug or other treatment "really works" so they can decide whether to take it.

Experts in child/cognitive development and pedagogy will, if asked, do a terrific job aligning the elements of the scientific method with the developing minds of the K-12 years to play to the natural strengths of each cohort of students. Each stage builds upon and creates synergy between the others. One is not more important or valuable than another.

I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, rather than theories to suit facts." — Sherlock Holmes (in A Scandal in Bohemia by A.C. Doyle)

In fact, we make a huge mistake in believing that the formal operations are "better" than the concrete ones. When we fail to gather enough "facts" early on, our hypotheses and theories and experiments will fail to produce beneficial results because we have become unmoored from the real world we are trying to understand. Even professional scientists can fall prey to the cognitive biases of their human brains, but better teaching of the scientific method and the value of diligent observation and data gathering will help us all to avoid many potentially fatal errors.

Conclusion

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. — Phillip K. Dick

In the USA (and other countries), we teach "science" as the RESULTS of the scientific method rather than the METHOD itself. This pedagogical error results in bored disengaged students, the majority of whom will never experience the natural thrill of discovery that might impel them into a science career. 

Teaching science as a pathway to discovering what is TRUE vs FALSE will equip every student with a valuable set of skills they can apply to every important decision and part of their lives (health, money, work, relationships, what to buy, who to vote for, what to “believe” on the internet etc). The return on investment of teaching science this way is beyond reckoning, though by now you should be saying

 "Let's do an experiment and see if we can calculate the effects of teaching science this way"

Congratulations you scientist you! 👏

(Let us maintain) a love of science and letters and a wish to patronize every rational effort to encourage schools, colleges, universities, academies, and every institution for propagating knowledge (and) virtue ... among all classes of the people, not only for their benign influence on the happiness of life in all its stages and classes, and of society in all its forms, but as the only means of preserving our Constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments. — John Adams, Inaugural Address, 1797

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