Creativity Adda 2024 Newsletter
- What if government schools took the lead in showing what education for the future might look like?
I just had a conversation with a friend who has recently joined an NCERT committee for science curriculum and textbooks. He asked me what I would include. I suggested:
1) Science needs to become more skeptical of SCIENCE. We should share the 10 biggest blunders that science has committed over the past 200 years - could be things like research to build nuclear bombs. One will easily start to understand that science and research is not some 'pure' subject, it is deeply laced with politics and economics. When reading any research paper, one should always ask who funded it and what are the perspectives of those who have different opinions.
2) Redefine who is a scientist. Scientists are not just in white lab coats who work in fancy labs. Our farmers, our grandmothers, our artisans, etc. are all living scientists (even if they do not read or write or have a degree). The educationist John Holt once said that 3-4 year children are the greatest scientists with their curiosity (but that gets usually killed by science classes in school by the time they become 10 years old).
3) Remind science that nature is not something separate from us (read: challenge the oxford dictionary definition of nature). What we do to nature, we do to ourselves. The rest of nature is alive, intelligent, communicating and inviting partnerships. Many of our indigenous traditions understood this and created deep rituals to remind of this. We have been trained to brand and dismiss them as 'superstitious' but a real scientist should be curious about the mystery and hold it as a question. For example, I have heard that people can speak to the plants and animals. I wonder why they never mention this in science textbooks.
4) The terrains are different than the maps (and what happens in a lab). It is critical for science to understand diverse local contexts and interconnectedness of these systems (for example, I just saw a great video about how the Sahara Desert feeds the Amazon forest from thousands of kilometers away). We also need to encourage kids to conduct more real research and experiments in their communities as part of Citizen science. I was recently at a kids science education museum in Udaipur. Sadly, while there was a beautiful exhibit about space travel, there was nothing about trying to understand what is the situation with our local rivers, forests, soils, air, food systems, etc. Good science can help us fall back in love with our local bio-regions.
5) Science should invite us into exploring these ancient philosophical questions of who am i?, what is my purpose?, what is happiness?, what is health?, what is justice?, what is love?, what is death?, etc. Such questions are essential to both our own freedom as well as reconnecting science to wisdom.
There is lots more. What points would you add for science educators to consider?