In
the United States, the main culture is that of willing and happy
ignorance and intellectual laziness. In this culture, intellectual
curiosity and contemplating knowledge is shunned as “nerdy”, a
term used as a negative term to denote someone who is somehow lesser
than themselves, because of that intrinsic curiosity and need to
figure everything out. The modern American “major-cultures”
think of themselves as superior to that of the “sub-culture” of
“nerd”, the prior having the God Complex about being part of the
crowd, the latter not really caring about how they are labeled by the
rest of society, so long as they are left to their intellectual
devices.
In
the intellectual development of any individual, I see four necessary
legs; the household, the community, the educational system, and
finally the individual. Any one of these four legs fail, the
intellectual development of the individual fails. Here I will
concentrate on the educational system.
I
am sad to say I am more ignorant than I should be on the educational
systems outside of the United States, so everything under the
umbrella of education on this blog post is specifically to the
States, or when specified, to Clark County. It also looks at the
K-12 system public system, ignoring upper education and also ignoring
the private sector of K-12. The intent is to broaden the scope to
the leg to everyone in the nation, not everyone who happens to have
the fiscal capacity to go further.
(Start
short rant of everything you've probably heard before.)
The
educational system in this country is a joke right now. The
administrative branches are over paid, while those on the front lines
of education are underpaid. The books are out of date. The
materials covered for classes is insufficient. There is little drive
to take advantage of technology in the classroom, and where there is,
there seems to be insufficient funds to do so. Kids are bored.
They're learning things in high school they learned in middle school.
I can go on this schpeel ad nausium, but I won't.
(End
rant.)
Since
I am a man of science, my view point on education will be
predominantly on science and mathematics. Similar mentalities may be
utilized for language classes, liberal arts, government class, social
studies, and any other course out there, with alterations only to the
details.
When
we are in high school, we go through math up to and including what we
call “Algebra 2”, which comes up with some new concepts to me,
but most of which I have already figured most of it out. Most of it
is elementary stuff, so much so that I have learned some of it in
middle school. There are some students who go up to calculus, but
the majority of students actively do not want to go there, because it
is math; it is a nerdy topic.
On
the science side in high school, we take chemistry, biology, and
environmental science. We also take physics if we want to go there.
The concepts in these particular fields are so rudimentary that they
don't really need much mental facilities at all to get your head
around.
The
problem with both sides of this particular coin is how the material
is taught. It is taught in a fashion which the student is told
“Don't worry about how this final answer was discovered or deduced;
don't worry about the thought process that went behind it. It's just
a fact you should accept to be true and memorize.”
The
problem with this method of “learning” is that it is disturbingly
similar to learning the bible or the Qu'ran or the Torah, or any holy
text. High school science and math teachers expect the students they
teach to have faith that the facts the students memorize are true, as
if science is merely a body of data to be memorized.
This
should not be the case.
Science
is a way of thinking, a way to use the brain you were born with to be
able to slog through information and think your way to a conclusion.
Mathematical proofs are done in this fashion. The “facts” you
learned in high school science are conclusions of logical thought
from data gathered. The main goal of any science or math course,
regardless of what level it is, should be on understanding why it is
so, not merely memorizing that it is so.
The
problem begins at the elementary school level. I could see the line
Yesterday. As some of of you may know, March 31st,
2012 was Nano Day, a day which Children's Museums around America
invited Chemistry and Physics clubs from universities around the
nation to come in and set up booths to explain what nano technology
and nano science is and how it affects us on a daily bases. I was at
a booth at the Lied Discovery Children's Museum where I was
demonstrating how to separate objects by size using mesh screens
similar to that of your screen doors. Different size holes of the
mesh separate different size objects.
Now,
I can see a distinctly different level of curiosity between the third
graders and fifth graders who came to my booth. The third graders
were of high curiosity, excited to try it out for themselves. The
fifth graders looked very bored, as if they were waiting for the
final answer to the problem in class.
With
this in mind, I think the problem lies somewhere from late in third
grade to somewhere early in the fifth grade, where curiosity is being
driven out of the child and the mentality of memorizing is driven
into the child. I do not know this for certain, but based in this
rudimentary observation, this seems to be the case. I also do not
know the mechanism for this switch, but it seems to be in the school.
If it were with the individual, the parents, or the environment,
then there would be a far less noticeable separation in age and
academic level. Since there is a distinct line between grade levels,
I am deducing that the problem is with the educational system here in
Las Vegas.
I
do not know what the causal mechanism for this problem is; I will not
pretend that I do. I do however know that there is one there, and
that it is the root of all the educational problems afterwards. The
curiosity is driven out of students somewhere in the forth grade,
maybe as early as the last few weeks of the third grade, maybe as
late as the first few weeks of the fifth grade. To get a better
gauge on this, I want to ask parents of children in these grade
levels to keep an eye out for curriculum differences between these
grade levels to see what they are. If you have an idea, please leave
a comment below.
My
prompt for parents is to make sure that the curiosity of your
children does not go away. This curiosity is key to the future
happiness and success of your children. For everybody else, my
prompt to you is to be a mentor to a child, and do the same for them.
I know I will.
Until
next time, I bid you happy travels, curiosity in all that you do, and
joy in all. And as always, don't forget to be awesome.
-K.
“Alan” Eister,
Δαβ
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