

Pediatric Environmentalism - DanielBMarkham
http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/16/science-education-environment-opinions-contributors-henry-i-miller_print.html

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lutorm
"Too often the objective of student projects seems to be "empowering" the kids
and giving them a feeling of accomplishment instead of getting the right
answer and learning scientific principles."

I would argue that these two goals are not mutually exclusive. If all you do
is teaching kids the right answer, which is largely what schools do, then you
end up exactly where we are today, where kids largely don't feel like science
is about investigation at all but just about rote memorization of facts.

~~~
jerf
I would argue that nobody said they are exclusive, and diving down that mental
path is a great way to end up talking yourself into a position in which you
have justified to yourself that it's OK to lie about the science if it leads
to Right Thinking.

Facts are a prerequisite to true learning. They are necessary to jumpstart the
autodidact process. If you give up on them at the beginning, the children will
notice, and you will end up with neither the autodidacts we desire nor people
who even understand basic facts through rote memorization. Teaching children
to investigate without giving them the proper basis of facts will result in
them "investigating" up some homeopathy or astrology or other such things. Or
stupid theories about electromagnetic OMGRadiation!!1! killz beez!
(OMGRadiation!!1! being my personal pet name for the usual concept of
radiation that people have hammered in them by Hollywood.)

False environmental consciousness isn't even a virtue. It's cute to see
schoolchildren worry about the bees dying due to cell phone towers. It's
somewhat less cute when they're still worried about that at voting ages. You
get the double-whammy of them wasting economic resources trying to deal with a
false threat posed by cell phone towers while the real threat goes
unaddressed.

~~~
patio11
_False environmental consciousness isn't even a virtue._

See also: DDT, GMO, vaccines, and irradiation in the context of food safety. I
really don't care if recycling becomes a secular religion even if it is a net
waste of energy, but deeply held beliefs about the above four _kill people_.

------
matthewsimon
Oh my god -- a class of fifth graders in 2009 wasn't aware of two relevant
scientific papers published in 2008?

 _The only way to explain these pre-teen children's ignorance of this
knowledge is that there's a conspiracy dedicated to hiding the facts from
them!_

No, in practice eleven-year-old kids usually aren't reading the current
scientific literature -- they're learning from their teachers and reading
texts that have been written for students, and it's not surprising that it
takes a few years for new information to permeate the educational system.

I understand the concern the piece is raising, but surely there are better
examples than that, right?

~~~
MichaelGG
I thought the article was quite clear on this. The more important point is:
_Probable causes? In fact, there's no scientific evidence that cellphones,
pesticides, global warming or the alleged insufficiency of wildflowers are
linked in any way to CCD._

Not knowing recent research on it might be fine. Maybe the articles were in
Spanish and hard to find or something. But if the lesson ended up with kids
getting concerned and writing letters, and they say "yea we're not sure, it
could be some stuff that's unrelated", that sounds like a missed learning
opportunity, maybe.

~~~
_delirium
I don't think the kids are doing too badly on that one, though, because you'd
get results not entirely dissimilar if you polled working biologists. CCD is a
particularly tricky example because _everyone_ agrees that something is
happening, but _no_ causes have proven links. Yet there presumably is some
cause or set of causes, so scientists differ in their hypotheses as to what
those causes might be. I suspect if you were to poll, you'd find that very few
think a link to cell-phone towers is probable, but quite a few think a link to
pesticides is probable.

