I agree..especially with your first sentence. I still read encyclopedias and DK publications meant to explain science for kids. I learnt a lot of science concepts from encyclopedias as a child.
I find that today children’s education of scientific concepts is cartoonised and made into ‘fun’. These kids grow up to write about science as entertainment.
Any form of education should be challenging. Not fun. I am very taken aback and strongly disapprove of the American tendency to inject ‘fun’ into everything.
Example: learning Math should bring joy..not fun. If learning science and math is about ‘fun’, when the next fun thing comes along..learning would be abandoned.
I also believe that learning should keep one hungry and wanting more. In that.. it has to be a goal that is always a tad difficult to reach. America fails badly here. I can’t speak for other countries.
India and Europe where I have spent time do a better job in this regard, but my opinion about these places are dated.
You have a point. Replacing the stupid message "science is fun, (thus scientists are here to entertain us)" by "science is important (so scientists are here to solve our problems)" would be a drastic improvement.
If we don't have better science news is direct consequence of the disrespect or even deliberate mocking shown for science in the last decades by prominent politicians.
Deliberate dehumanization or mocking of scientists by journalists is also a really old problem; A piece of news titled: "'politicians' say that X is true" would be redone immediately and replaced with the name of the politicians saying that. For science, not having the right of linking your name to your hard work until the four paragraph is the norm.
And this if you have luck, I know the case of a scientist that was asked to be interviewed for a newspaper about their career. She thanked him for their patience, time and free advice, calling him egghead in the newspaper.
Another problem is the infamous formatting all scientific news to pulp format with variants of "scientists are perplexed!" at the end (just to tickle your audience with the implicit message that "they are not smarter than us"). When people is bombed constantly with "science can't explain it", "researchers are puzzled", etc, the trust in science is seriously damaged. And then we have people acting irrationally in the middle of a pandemic, just to make a point.
I find that today children’s education of scientific concepts is cartoonised and made into ‘fun’. These kids grow up to write about science as entertainment.
Any form of education should be challenging. Not fun. I am very taken aback and strongly disapprove of the American tendency to inject ‘fun’ into everything.
Example: learning Math should bring joy..not fun. If learning science and math is about ‘fun’, when the next fun thing comes along..learning would be abandoned.
I also believe that learning should keep one hungry and wanting more. In that.. it has to be a goal that is always a tad difficult to reach. America fails badly here. I can’t speak for other countries.
India and Europe where I have spent time do a better job in this regard, but my opinion about these places are dated.