A New Approach to Teaching Science

Gallenod writes "The Washington Post has an article on Joy Hakim, an author trying to re-write junior-high science textbooks to make them more readable. There are some interesting observations on how traditional textbook publishing houses control pretty much everything children read in school and her difficulties in challenging the status quo. However, she's already succeeded with an award-winning history textbook series, so maybe she'll rack up another win here."

Comments

Re:A Kinesthetic Approach

[Caoch93]

Science is perfectly capable of answering "why" questions. Granted, the answers that it provides are necessarily incomplete, pointing to deeper questions, but an incomplete answer is still an answer. There are NO complete answers to ANY question, inside or outside the realm of science.

This may depend on what one is looking for in a "why" question. My interpretation of the original post stating that science doesn't address "why" questions is that science cannot answer the "why" in a more existential sense. Scientific models certainly explain why two billiard balls have the trajectories they do after they collide, but this can be seen as a "how" question...as in "How do these billiard balls interact when they collide?"

In my (most likely deluded) opinion, a critical shift in science came when scientists stopped trying to ascribe reasons and meanings to the events of the natural world and instead studied their mechanics. The world Aristotle gave the West was based on the need to seek meaning and purpose behind the natural world, and it was well surpassed when scientists left his mode of inquiry for a more dispassionate study of the mechanics things.

So, I think this is mostly an argument where semantics severely get in the way. IMHO, science models action, not meaning, which is what is meant by "how, not why".