Over at NPR’s Monkey See pop-culture blog, Linda Holmes interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson (who’s promoting his new NOVA special, The Pluto Files), who as always has interesting stuff to say.
In particular, he says this:
The center line of science literacy — which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point — is how you think. If someone comes up to you and says, “I have these crystals. If you rub them together, it will heal your ailments.” I don’t want you to say, “Oh, that’s bunk.” No. Because extreme skepticism, such as that, and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all. And I don’t think I’m the first to say that.
So the thought is — what’s your next thought when someone approaches you with the crystals? It should be, “How does that work? How do you know it works? By what mechanism does it work? How much does it cost? Where did you get the crystals? What evidence do you have that it would work on me?” Start asking questions. And people who are just charlatans out there, or are self-deluded, you’ll reach a point where they don’t have answers to those questions, because if they did, they wouldn’t be trying to sell you crystals.
And this:
Parents come up to me, “How do I get my kids interested in science?” They’re already interested in science. Just stop beating it out of them.
People fret and wring their hands and wonder about why the USA is doing so poorly in science education compared to so many other countries. And the answer, as it turns out, is pretty simple: because we’re not listening to people like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Because we still, to this day, buy at least somewhat into the notion that children should be seen and not heard. That “well-behaved” is better than curious and skeptical. That kids need to be able to regurgitate information by rote on standardized tests to prove that they’re learning, but not that they should at any point be allowed or encouraged to think for themselves and question what they’re being taught.
That’s the thing about science: it’s not biology, chemistry, physics, or at least, it’s not just those things. Science is how you look at the world and how you treat the information you’re given. Science is saying, “That doesn’t sound right to me, I need to figure this out for myself” when someone presents something as fact. Scientific literacy, as Tyson defines it, is about being able and willing to ask questions. As such, scientific literacy is important not just when you’re in biology, chemistry and physics classes, but in language arts and social studies and everyday out-of-school life. In short, teaching scientific literacy means teaching critical thinking.
And all of this means, as Tyson observes, not stifling the natural curiosity and exploratory nature of children. And this means, for example, not banning the dictionary because you’re worried that children will discover “words of concern” in it. It means not being afraid of ideas, no matter how much we disagree with them or think they’re wrong or stupid or perhaps even dangerous. Children who are trained to be scientifically literate are children with a finely-tuned bullshit detector, and the ideas that are wrong or stupid just don’t stand up to scrutiny from a finely-tuned bullshit detector. And any idea that fails under scrutiny like that can’t really be all that dangerous, can it?
Tip o' the hat for this post's title to Randall Munroe's xkcd.