Myths About Science Education

Recently I decided to go back to school to study science, and, astoundingly, most people I’ve crossed paths with have been enormous dicks about it. Even the secretary at the office of the registrar said, “Science? How do you know you want to study...

by Kara Crabb

March 6, 2013, 4:45pm

This guy ripped apart bodies for fun.

Recently, I decided to go back to school to study science, and, astoundingly, most people I’ve crossed paths with have been enormous dicks about it. Even the secretary at the office of the registrar said, “Science? How do you know you want to study science? Science is hard, you know.”

Really? Science is hard? Because I was hoping to shit out my insides, smear it all over the lecture hall, and win a Nobel Prize.

Maybe I want to study science because I realize that I’m a stupid idiot and want to CHANGE that. Or maybe it’s because, among the swamp of retards I’ve come across thanks to my life choices, I’ve met a few people who study science, and they have been the most inspiring to me.

I went to an all-arts high school and a Catholic grade school. I even convinced my guidance counselor to annul my mandatory science credit because I didn’t think I would “need” it. But this is exactly what’s so baffling to me!

HOW ARE RELIGION, ART, AND SCIENCE ALL SEPARATE THINGS?!?!?!?

By its nature, an educational institution should acknowledge true facts; for example, the fact that the Bible is a fairy tale written by men who were stupider than most of today’s ten-year-olds. Sure, I learned scientific facts in Catholic school, but they were paired with a confusing and entirely separate curriculum about how to find truth and meaning and love and beauty. While a lot of my mental acuity went toward dissecting these religious contradictions, and all of the bizarre social implications that go along with them, I could have been putting that energy toward trying to understand truth and meaning and love and beauty within my immediate surroundings, within nature, within the universe… BY STUDYING “SCIENCE.”

Oh look, abstract art/stem cell differentiation.

There should be no distinction between these fields. While art school helped me exhaust my creativity and learn how to be a pretentious asshole, everything I studied had to be understood through the scope of human perception. That would be a good primer for every type of education. Why is the curriculum so fucking backward? Do you think a 14-year-old kid is going to give a shit about cell anatomy when they could be painting pictures of boobs and getting just as much praise for doing it well? If you taught cell anatomy by saying something like, “Cells make up boobs, and your life is purposeless,” you’d have a lot more teenagers interested in science.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that science isn’t hard when you understand what it is. It’s everything. Ever.

Similarly, math isn’t hard when you understand what it’s for: drawing pictures.

Wow, math in a cute little decorative seashell. Oh shit, everything has an interesting calculable pattern to it.

Proportions, balance, and distribution are all fundamental parts of painting a picture, and also parts of realizing any physical or ideological shape or form. We’re just living in a world full of shapes and lines and curves and dots, and on what feels like an infinite number of planes! (I wish I would have done acid a lot earlier in life.)

Even chaos has an interesting calculable pattern to it.

Why do you think Asians are so much better at everything than Westerners? Obviously they’re doing something different in their education system. And education—science education in particular—is a huge economic engine. Convincing babies that buying things will ensure a better life for them and for their fellow citizens can only get us so far. And by “us,” I mean the people making money in Western societies. So by “us,” I don’t mean us at all.

Pedagogy needs to be different. Waldorf schools are interesting, but they still seem too fluffy and right brained. I think there are ways to merge all of the academic fields in order to make them more comprehensible and exciting to kids, and, most importantly to politicians, beneficial to the economy.

Remember when you were four years old, and you would look at the sun in the backseat of the family car during road trips and you’d be like, “Hey, Mom, why doesn’t the sun move with the car?” And she’d be like, “I don’t know, it just doesn’t.” And then you’d be like, “Well, fuck, I guess I’ll just sit here and shit my pants like an idiot then.”

It doesn’t have to be that way! It’s time we started teaching four-year-olds astrophysics. Why not?

Kids are sponges; they’ll soak up literally anything you give to them. So why do adults feel they need to limit the knowledge they throw out there? Kids will care about blue triangles and red circles just as much as they’ll care about the red fucking circle right above their heads. It all comes down to how you express these things. God, this language is so FUCKED.

Screw the alphabet; teach them binary. Teach them all of the alphabets. Teach them sign language.

Don’t just teach them chronological numbers. Teach them patterns and spirals and loops and series.

Maybe some kids would prefer thinking about numbers like this.

I don’t want to be like some crazed totalitarian forcing information into kids’ brains. I just think that younger generations will be getting smarter thanks to technological advancements, but will have fewer and fewer ways to express their intelligence as long as the education system stays stunted. Essentially, we’ll be dealing with a bunch of Helen Kellers, I think.