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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."
A friend of mine is actually the first test tube baby born in the UK. "Your dad's a turkey baster" kinda demands more of an explaination
The question is, how many are baffled, and how many just don't care to learn it? Learning for the sake of learning doesn't seem to be popular anymore, people squeeze by with the bare minimum they can cram into their skulls so there's more space left over for American Idol, Reality TV and celebrity gossip. At least that is what I see here, I can't think of any reason it would be any different in the UK.
This type of news item is sort of a cheap shot by journalists. It's an old trick that probably dates back to antiquity--look how stupid these people are, they can't answer simple questions! And the consumer rolls their eyes, feels superior, etc. Look on youtube [below], there are some hilarious videos about Americans, British, Germans being "stupid". The vids were done as an exercise in psychological manipulation. One example.
In "The Demon Haunted World", Carl Sagan recalls a taxi driver who professed to be very interested in science ... then asked Sagan about flying saucers, Atlantis, etc.
Sagan describes his sadness at having to tell the guy that so many of his interests are "baloney" ... and his anger at an educational system that didn't equip the guy with the knowledge to distinguish science from pseudo-science.
A couple of decades later, school science teaching still seems to be less about critical thinking and more about absorbing facts handed down from on high. I imagine that most science *teachers* wish it were otherwise, but are bound by the curriculum.
When I was young I had a book called "Weet je waarom ... ?" ("Do you why ... ?") which contained funny and informative answers to general questions. From silly kid questions to just generally how the world works. Beats google every time for kids, everyone should have one of these in their house and look up stuff with their kids for fun.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
I was extremely lucky. My science teacher was a research scientist who quit researching for the specific purpose of "teaching correctly". It didn't matter what the cirriculum was, she forced you to reason your way to answers.
I realized just how effective this was in my Freshman biology class when the student next to me, who was someone you'd probably refer to as a "typical black teen male" turned to me and said, "Man... you can't avoid learning in this class... yesterday I was makin' myself a sandwich and when I pulled the mayonase out I started thinking about what an immulsion was..."
But teaching at that level is absolutely exhausting... the trick, I've learned, is to show people that things follow a logical path. People, especially young people, just wait until someone tells them what happens next. Often they don't even attempt to figure out on their own what happens next. Really good science teachers challenge you to do that first. Everything else follows.
FanFictionRecs.net
I was refering to teenagers...
FanFictionRecs.net
Since my daughter was around 6, I've routinely made up answers that sound plausible at first but are clearly wrong if anyone over 5 thinks about them for a few seconds. She does the whole "thanks! ... um, wait, that's not right!" reaction, and I give her the right answers.
I work in science, so I want her to know science... but I also want her to think critically and know when someone's BS'ing her. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Citations please.
I know you're just being a racist troll, but...
From the numbers you provided, the sample groups were inadequate. Over the years, I've met many people, and had the opportunity to learn a lot about them. There are stereotypical and astereotypical people in every group. In a sampling of say 10 people, they may all be complete idiots, or rocket scientists. Looks are frequently deceiving.
The IQ scores are almost always skewed. It's not how "smart" you are, but how educated you are. For example, I've known poor farmers who were not well educated, but through what they have been educated in, it's apparent that they are smart. A good farmer can repair his own equipment, sometimes with minimal tools. He can raise crops even in adverse conditions. He can raise cattle from birth to slaughter, and take care of any problem along the way. One in particular who would score miserably on a standardized IQ test, and never completed high school could look at the symptoms of an animal, and treat it properly. He kept his 40 year old truck on the road without ever taking it to a mechanic, and could revive almost any piece of farm equipment. He could solve real world logical problems in a heart beat. He wouldn't have a prayer solving an algebraic equation, could barely spell, and had no clue what to do with a computer though. He was never taught those skills.
Then again, his neighbor would be hard pressed to repair a fence. Was he stupid? I don't know, I didn't know the neighbor well enough. Maybe he had simply never needed to repair a fence, and had never been taught. Could you?
I personally know someone, approximately 30 years old, who usually scored just over 100 on an IQ test. She had never finished high school. She recently started taking GED classes. Now that she has picked up the required skills, she retested and scored 138. She didn't get any smarter in a matter of weeks. She simply gained the skills required to score better on the IQ test. Because I knew her personally, I knew she was smart. With the new score, she now believes it. What is Pi? What is an acute triangle? What does E=MC^2 mean? If you were never taught such things, those would mean absolutely nothing to you.
Someone else I know was convinced she was stupid. She was told so for too many years. She decided to prove them wrong, and is a better programmer than I am now, fluent in several programming languages. I don't know her IQ score, but I'm confident in seeing her ability in fields that she has the skills in that she's brilliant.
I've known people who score very low. I tried to tutor someone who was mentally retarded in reading. I was teaching him letters, which took a while. We then started on words and sounding them out. He could accomplish simple words, but it was difficult at best for him. He was told that he would never read, because he was too stupid. It was more that the extra time wasn't spent with him on it. He'll never be a rocket scientist or a surgeon, so yes, his IQ was low. And he is white of European descent.
To be on topic, if you were never told why the sky was blue, would you know the answer? What if it simply wasn't important to you at the time you were told? You'd likely forget. Grouping "parents" into one general category is insane. Almost everyone can be a parent. Well, I'd say a decent percentage of Slashdot readers won't, because of social ineptness. :) I'm a parent of 3, and father-like figure to more. Sometimes the children are afraid to ask. "Where do babies come from?" may be too mysterious a question. I was asked recently about sex by a friend's son. He was afraid to ask his mother, and his father avoided the question. I answered age appropriately, and then told him it was fine to tell his mother. His reponse? "I can't talk to mom about stuff like that. She's a girl
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
She asked me what PH meant.
I said (remembering my chemistry) "percentage hydrogen"
"OK", she said, "why does it go from 0 to 14, and what hydrogen? like hydrogen in water?"
Uhm... lets ring Grandad (my dad was a research chemist).
A bit later...
"He says its the inverse natural logarithm or "cologarithm" of the number of active hydrogen ions"
Me "Uh.... that's great".
Later that week
"Did you get a good mark for your homework?"
"Yes. Only the teacher said that for GCSE If I am asked what PH is just to put 'a measure of acidity and alkalinity', or the marker might not know and mark it incorrect'".
this reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke's Final Odyssey (3001), where nobody knew anything except what was required to do their job, simply because they already had to learn too much. the difference, though, is that few people are operating at the limit of their mental capacity these days (or any other day, for that matter).
weinersmith
>>Please describe a point in history where it was ever popular...seriously, there will always be a distribution of intelligence, quit bitching that you're on the higher end of it.
During the space race. My mom was a literature person, but even she got interested in science and started reading a lot of Heinlein, etc., and now writes sci-fi of her own.
Wrong. A vast majority of people have always just learned enough just to get by. There has never been a period in human history where the vast majority of people sat around reading philosophy and physics books and discussed xyz science discovery. Call it human nature, but people tend to focus on the things that are most entertaining to them, and most people just want to know enough to have a decent discussion with the rest of the people around them.
I cant recall the last time I sat down with anyone and chatted about "Cirrus clouds", but this is the crap they teach in 5th grade. Why? Because the 14th century concept of the "new man". Its a failed paradigm that we still cling to: people being smart all around.
The education system, I'd say across the world is completely outdated and is a perfect example of a government run system. Even with all the technological advances available to schools, we still use the 17th century lecture style instruction method across the globe. We cram 30 students into the room with 1 teacher, and force everyone to learn at one pace: from the smartest to the dumbest. This made sense when schools taught the basics: reading, writing and arithmetic. This system was never meant to produce "college students". No, college students came from "wealthy" families that could afford nice schools with small classes that offered more personal attention from the academic instructor.
Intrusive government in the western world in cooperation with the unions work diligently to keep schools with a certain child to teacher ratio, in order to ensure more "jobs", not more educated children. Lets face it. You can put 100 children into a curriculum and augment it with a computer learning system and easily handle it with 1 teacher. This is being done with colleges all across the nation, right now. The teacher simply helps answer question while the computer handles the bulk of the instruction (yup, you can even complement the learning with pictures, videos, audio, etc..). Let the kids learn at their own pace and see what happens.
You wont get this though. Because we live in a world that demands "social justice" aka: forcing the smartest to be clumped in with the dumbest and the laziest.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
To quote a wonderfully silly film, The Gods Must Be Crazy:
Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment. For instance, if it's Monday and 7:30 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 8:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 15 minutes. And then, you have to look busy again. Your day is chopped into pieces. In each segment of time you adapt to new circumstances. ... No wonder some people go off the rails a bit.
I am officially gone from
Science during the Roman empire was very popular. The knowledge, inventions, progress, vast libraries etc were unparallelled.
Science only stopped when the empire fell and religion was allowed to rule.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.