02-09-2011

Warning: This one's a long one.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I’d like to take this opportunity to share my longwinded thoughts on something near and dear to my heart – Science Education, or oftentimes, the lack thereof.

Science and Mathematics are two subjects that South Africa and the United States seem to hit about the same intensity – and they both seem to do it wrong. Test scores and general student interest in the subjects, in both nations, are generally low. Interestingly enough, this is true across all racial divides; across socioeconomic levels in both the United States and the even more racially divided South Africa. Every politician, at all levels, in endless speeches and a Ferris wheel of phrasing, has acknowledged that this fundamental problem will reverberate in the next generation’s approach to global issues and challenges – challenges that will require skill and understanding based firmly in the basics of the sciences and mathematics taught to children.

Interestingly enough, both the United States and South Africa have a history of scientific achievement. I’m pretty sure everybody who reads my blog could name by heart at least one scientist from America whose work affect their lives. And in South Africa, you had Dr. Christiaan Barnard, a surgeon who performed the world's first successful heart transplant.

So with all the glory of the sciences blared from every ivory tower…why are learners failing to grasp?

The Physical Science curriculum in South Africa is a horrendous mishmash of various scientific topics, often unrelated and presented in an ambiguous, convoluted or clearly incorrect manner. It is disastrously incoherent – jumping from Newton’s Laws to naming organic molecules, to the Doppler Effect to the diffraction of light to the equilibrium rates of reactions, to electrostatics to AC generators and finally a history of the South African coal and mining industry.

Looking at the work schedule for the year, I felt like the curriculum designer sat at a table, swallowed as many outdated college textbooks as possible, and vomited all over a pile of newspaper; whatever came out and was still partially legible – including the wet newspaper – made its way onto the national syllabus in the order it was found. The National curriculum takes too many concepts without clarity or connection, shoves them down the students’ throats and expects the students to successfully regurgitate them onto the single examination at the end of Grade 12. This is an inane and thorny task at even the best schools with the largest amount of resources in the Nation; try doing it in the rural outposts, where students do not even speak the language the test will be offered in. Is it succeeding? I will say that they are being forced to solve problems in fairly abstract scientific areas, but without knowledge or background of what those numbers they can so easily plug into, or read off of the calculator actually mean.

The class is difficult for difficulty’s sake, not for the sake of the science being taught.

First and foremost, students who come into a classroom need to understand what science is. Science is the study of Nature; it is the study of all we see around us. Science is not Nature itself; it is a process we use to understand Nature. It is not enough to know what Nature is, but how it is: this is the process of Science. It is asking a single question on a phenomena, making a guess to what an answer should be and why it should be, then answering that question with an objective experiment. If your answer was wrong, figure out why it’s wrong. Adjust your thinking, and learn. That is, from what I understand, science. It is organic and adaptive. It is more than just pouring one illegible chemical in a test tube into another illegible chemical in a test tube; it’s asking, “Why does the sun rise only in the East?”and “why do apples fall?”

Simple. Clear. Easy. These words are inviting to the layman, and seemingly, the bane of science. I’m not going to claim that academic science is, by any means, simple and easy; the heartbeat is a beautifully pure concept, which becomes terrifyingly complex when you go past the surface and look at the details. But I think that the scientists driven to these deeper searches of underlying mechanisms and principles are driven by a belief that the work they do expands and enriches the understanding that they fell in love with in the first place. And in order to get these scientists and engineers as adults, you must introduce them as children to these overarching and plain concepts.

Plenty of modern scientist-philosophers, principally those coming from the areas of High Energy Physics or Astrophysics, claim that a true theory of everything – combining all aspects of science – will need to be elegantly simple, concise and consistently true. I think that, maybe, we already have that fundamental theory in its primitive, qualitative form; in my undergraduate Thermal Physics class, Dr. Y. Lee – one of my favorite professors – said that there are two universal truths in physics. These are equilibrium and inefficiency. Equilibrium is the favoring of responses to stimuli that create a system of lowest continuous energy output; inefficiency is that, in these responses, you never get out as much as is put in – a little bit is always lost and irrecoverable. That’s it – that’s Physics! I sure wish that I had learned this, or maybe have been smart enough to figure it out on my own, back in high school.

Physics and Chemistry are riddled with theories (Newton’s Laws, Work-Energy theorem, LeChatelier’s Principle, Lenz’s Law, Gravitational / Electric Potentials and Fields, etc. etc. etc.) where equilibrium is being applied to a novel phenomenon, and nearly the entirety of thermodynamics is the study of the effects of inefficiency on processes. Everything relates back!

So where am I going with all of this? Take a look at a typical tenth grade Physics or Chemistry textbook. It parcels concepts along lines that are growing increasingly imaginary; any scientist or scholar will tell you that the separation between biology, chemistry and physics as well as the subdivisions within each of the three major fields are fading rapidly. I believe the interconnectedness is a story, with the subatomic interactions of quarks, leptons and fundamental forces leading to the atomic theory, organic chemistry, biological structures, and life itself. And along the way, the principles of equilibrium and universal inefficiency guide each step taken in every process by Nature.

That is how a good science class should be – it should be a story. It should go into the details of the various theories and laws, and it should always relate those theories and laws to one another in cause and effect. Throughout all of which, it should relate everything back to the most fundamental principles – so that students will not lose sight of the forest in the trees. This is a science class that is elegant, clear and concise.

Will this turn everyone and their mother into a scientist? Of course not. This is not the only problem that drives students from these fields. But it is one of the problems that is – and here is the key phrase in this blog post – SO SIMPLE to solve: basic, basic changes in the teaching style and approach to the overarching presentation of science. This is what will invite children to study science with rapt attention and genuine love.

And this is unifying – a global concept, that would apply with the same general effect for the systems of Education in the United States as well as South Africa.

That’s my two cents on the topic. Any thoughts or feedback?

-Ryan