#+title: Science Minus Science 

 #+author: Dylan Holmes

 #+email: ocsenave@gmail.com

 #+description: What's wrong with our current Science Education?

 #+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org

 #+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org

 

 

 Today's science classrooms are remarkably

 unscientific. According to prevailing wisdom, it is less important to teach

 the empirical mindset than to impart our accumulated scientific

 knowledge. Thus, because the field is so vast nowadays, teachers are

 obliged to be frugal with the facts: they must prune tangential

 subjects and pare whatever's left, watering down complicated results

 into simplified half-truths. Needs must when the devil drives, of

 course--but what is the end result?

 

 In modern science classrooms, students must swallow a 

 deluge of unfamiliar scientific dogma in time to

 regurgitate it onto an exam. To accomplish this daunting task, they

 cannot possibly stop to consider various alternatives which scientists

 have methodically eliminated over the course of centuries; instead,

 they must simply trust that science has done what it purports to have

 done--or, faster, simply stamp out their own conjectural, critical

 instincts.

 

 By the end of such a course, students might be able to recite the

 tenets of our current scientific creed and might employ those tenets

 when answering carefully formulated questions. But even if, by chance,

 our students get their facts straight, they will have acquired at most

 only our pre-processed truths, and nothing of the empirical machinery

 that produced them. 

 

 In my opinion, such a lackluster result demands

 that we re-evaluate our priorities. Surely the essential mark of the

 scientist is not her ability to recount the latest model of reality,

 but rather her pervasive inquiry and her methodical, empirical

 approach to obtaining answers? Instead of canonizing the latest

 theories, shouldn't we be stimulating a zeal for scrutinizing the

 them?

 

 #Surely the shibboleth of the

 #scientist is not his ability to recount the bleeding-edge depiction of

 #reality--after all, theories are transient and revolutions expected--but

 #rather his pervasive inquiries about the world and his methodical,

 #empirical approach to answering them? Indeed, don't we recognize the

 #scientist by his lack of allegiance to the status quo, by the way he

 #scrutinizes even his own theories with utmost irreverence?

  

 In valuing data absorption over methodical reason, we give our

 students a fragmentary and moreover inexplicable impression of

 reality. We must ask ourselves: how much of science is left in that?