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Parents Baffled By Science Questions
Pickens writes "The BBC reports that four out of five parents living in the UK have been stumped by a science question posed by their children with the top three most-asked questions: 'Where do babies come from?', 'What makes a rainbow?' and 'Why is the sky blue?'. The survey was carried out to mark the launch of a new website by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills called Science: So what? So everything."
Is the question "Where do babies come from?" really a science question?
I always was interested in science, and when I was younger, it drove me to learn things on my own. While I was in high school, I substituted for a teacher a few times...
But I was always amazed at how some people were so baffled by the simplest things that are very easy to learn about.
The everyday person needs to know more science. Unfortunately, many people who do know a lot of science act religious. They treat people who don't know it as inferior, and I believe that turns a lot of people away from learning about it. Not because they think science is less valid, but in a sense, because they don't want to be like the jackass that just got done making them feel worthless.
Honestly... I think people who know a lot of science are probably the biggest problem with science education.
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Obviously many parents parents need to be more like Calvin's Dad. He was never stumped by Calvin's science questions.
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"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Clifford Stoll's astronomy PhD orals seemed to be going swimmingly.
Just as everybody was about to gather their papers, shake hands and head home, his rather sadistic PhD supervisor asked him to explain why the sky is blue.
The sharks sensed blood in the water and began circling for the kill.
Don't assume a question is easily answered just because it seems simple and innocuous at first glance.
Honestly... I think people who know a lot of science are probably the biggest problem with science education.
The problem is not that science people are arrogant, the problem is that they come way too late in education (to properly explain the science method) at a point where all people did for the previous year was swallow factoid and regurgitate them (lower school science lesson is usually just that), and combined with the fact science is seen as nerdy/geeky and thus only for contempt. Later those same people which admire jocks and despite nerd become parents and are baffled by science question.Add to that the fact that science is sometimes seen as attacking/going against their own religious belief (in reality science as a method do not care for religion (except social science) what cannot be falsified is ignored)...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Yes. But it's not ok to drive a car without at least half an idea about where the gas goes, how to use the turn indicator, and so on. The same thing is true about science... people are muddling though life without knowing where the gas pedal is. They can't critically evaluate things because they don't have the basis to do so. Hell, just look at the "young earth" morons. They are so ignorant that they can't even properly evaluate evidence when it's presented to them. That is a failure of education.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
At least the first one the parents need to be able to answer, it they halfway have a memory left. As to the technicialities of the issue, if they really cannot talk about sex, they should be aware that they are putting their children at high risk of messing it up later (unwanted pregnancy, STDs) and fix this disgrace immediately. There are books that help and that deal specifically with how to explain this to your children. Go to your local bookstore and ask! Grossing the children out is a minor and acceptable possible side effect. But they need to be told!
As to 2. and 3., I can understand that. These are actually advanced wave-physics questions.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If this happens to you, the best thing to do is say that you don't know and go find out together with your child. This not only gives you something fun to do, it can help teach them to explore the internet, a bookstore, or a library. Most importantly it teaches them how to learn things.
The cool thing is, most of these basic questions have many levels beneath them. For example, most of you know why grass is green, but why is chlorophyll green? Why is green a really odd color for plants to use? Would "orange-phyll" (if it existed) work too? This leads to an exploration of chemistry and physics as well as biology.
Another good thing to teach is how people know this stuff - the idea that the natural world is knowable through discovery and testing, and that we decide as a community what "the truth" is, based on what we observe and what makes sense. Kids can certainly learn the idea of what science is at a pretty young age, even if complex logic isn't possible until, I don't know, early teens? Hmm, something to look up!
After all, when asked about the color of the sky, a parent could answer like this.
Let us give thanks that some people have the sense and honesty to say "I don't know," and try not to look down our noses at them. Bad parenting is darned hard to unlearn.
--
Toro
Sometimes you people just creep me out :)
No, that doesn't follow. Anyone with even a bit of physics knows more than Newton ever did, that doesn't mean that he is today universally considered an idiot.
And if you don't explain the Rayleigh effect properly (as you did) you actually don't explain why the sky is blue. In other words, your answer isn't explanatory/informative much because you "explained" the explanandum by introducing another one.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
It turns out that parents don't answer their kids correctly, because when you type in "how to" into a Google search field, you get some pretty interesting (albeit sad) suggestions for search results. And to be honest, if children don't know where babies come from, then how do you expect them to NOT have kids at a young age?
Lose the attitude, dude. There's a bell curve on knowing raw amounts of any subject, and Slashdot just so happens to be much further up on it, especially in science-related fields, than your average person. Just because we're at and near the top doesn't mean we should ridicule them. It means we should help to educate them, so that by the time we're up further in our absolute level of knowledge, so are they.
From this point of view, all that is needed is to be able to explain light from the sun is made up of all colors (no need to explain wavelengths) - which you can demonstrate with a bit of broken glass, no need for an official prism - and are then most of the way to the rainbow explanation - and that the blue light from the sun is spread out more by the atmosphere. You can demonstrate scattering simply by putting a little milk in a glass of water and shining a flashlight through it. This is a level of explanation suitable for a child under, say, 13, and already introduces a number of ideas about optics.
As for where babies come from, even quite small children are quite safe with the idea that babies grow inside their mothers. Rural children can hardly avoid knowing this by the age of 3 or so. They need reassurance that it won't happen to them, yet, and they need a gradual increase of detail until they reach puberty. But they don't need to know about DNA, cell fission, fertilisation and so on in order to understand what causes pregnancy and how to avoid it until it's actually wanted.
Personally, I blame not so much the dumbing down as the increasing formalism of science teaching. The criticism of science teaching in Brazil made by Richard Feynmann is now valid in much of the West today. We actually need to teach ideas with simpler, more familiar equipment rather than the special manufactured experiments in school labs, otherwise how can people see the relevance? The example above, of someone suddenly realising that mayonnaise is an emulsion, is a good one.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I suspect there is never such a point, if you're raising your child properly.
Two things here: people shouldn't be having kids if they're uncomfortable with their motivations for sex or uncomfortable teaching a child basic things about life. Secondly, I think most of that discomfort with teaching kids about sex is largely fear of other adults thinking their child knows too much or is talking inappropriately.
Too true.
Uggh. At this point I'm hoping you're some kind of school inspector that has the power to get these people banned from teaching.
The sky is *not* blue! First of all, depending which way you are looking, what part of the world you are in, altitude, and what time of day it is, amongst other things, the sky can vary from almost green to almost violet. That's leaving out the obvious exceptions for sunrise and sunset, etcetera. Secondly, as a painter I see many colours in almost any sky. Clouds are not white or grey, either... except in some parts of the cloud. Even on a sunny day at noon you can see subtle pinks, and yes, greens in clouds...
Yes, yes, I know that the consensus is that the sky is "blue" - what intrigues me is how unobservant a lot of scientific people can apparently be, and how unsubtle in their pronouncements.
If you want to generalise, it is probably more accurate to describe the sky on a sunny day as 'cyan' in many parts of the world... at least nearer to the horizon. As you look more upwards, it grades towards what us arty, useless, non-geeks would call a "cobalt blue" ;-)
Suggestion: Instead of agreeing when a child asks the leading question "Why is the sky blue?", take said child outside and say "Let's look and see if it is all the same colour, then see if we can work out why afterwards."
The sense of wonder is more important than factual explanations, and the latter should follow the former in importance.
Gees, Slashdotters, get some paints out and start looking !!
(Add !! ad libitum)
I think Einstein said it best (and much shorter) with this quote: "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
The only reasonable IQ tests don't ask you about pi, right triangles, or e=mc^2. They show you a shape and ask you to point to the most or least similar shape in a small set of possible choices, or they show you some simple "if A--> B, and C --->B, then is A --> C necessarily true?" sorts of questions. Two things will obviously get in the way: reading ability and comfort with this sort of test environment. School knowledge beyond what's learned around age 8 shouldn't matter much.
I'm with HJED on this one.
Can I work out the answers to those questions? Yes. And actually the specific examples given are quite easy. But give me a restaurant bill and ask me to work out my tax and tip and I'm likely to take quite a bit longer than someone "good at math" "should."
But then, I formulate and solve all kinds of harder math problems on a daily basis. In fact, at a recent conference of control theoreticians -- whose field is heavily mathematical -- you should have seen them trying to work out how to split their restaurant bills.
It's arithmetic that's the issue, and I freely admit I suck at it. I also freely admit that this is entirely my own fault, because I've never has the willpower to sit down and drill myself on it. I know and understand the algorithms. I can execute them. But I don't have the associations built up in my head between certain combinations of numbers (say, numerals and their nines-complement, or multiplication tables) the way other people do. I'm sure I could get quite good at arithmetic. But I find it mind-numbingly boring, and I have a terrible time getting myself to do anything that dull. I'll leave the execution of arithmetic algorithms to the computers.
I think that what's basically at issue here is that we're assuming that anyone who can't do what we think is easy must be stupid. It's not true (a fact I need often to remind myself). They might just be interested in different things. Now, sometimes we might be right (without our belief systems) to dismiss those interests as banal. But at other times I think we just need to accept that different people would like to do different things -- and in fact this is the basis for civilization.
Getting other people to do things for you, and not knowing how everything works is positive, it's called civilisation. Possibly people could live on this planet as complete autonomous islands, being completely self sufficient, but working together and sharing tasks is more efficient for everybody, frees up time, and allows for redundancy.
You may be able to manage to maintain a 21st (or even 19th) century lifestyle all on your own but most people just wouldn't have the time to plant their own crops, grow cotton, weave their clothes, find metal ores, mine them, smelt them to produce metal goods, build petrol driven machines from the raw ores, learn enough medical science to undertake complex medical operations when accidents and illness occurred, raise children, find the time to teach them, still keep this going after you've had an accident and are laid up in bed for six months, etc.
And this is exactly why I oppose the repeated attempts to add more and more standardized testing to elementary education. Poor managers think that they can replace personal judgment with tests and statistics and systems. It's been shown to be a complete failure in industry according to every software engineering class I've ever taken, but education boards insist upon doing it for teachers and students.
If anyone's interested in this sort of thing, The Mismeasure of Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) is a really interesting look at the ridiculous motivations and mistakes that resulted in IQ becoming synonymous with intelligence.