There's a centrally bulging piece of spherical glass mounted on a stand with a curved depression to hold it. A wooden box with a triangular hole houses a tiny bulb with a cord plugged into the mains. The box is placed 30 centimeters from the glass. A white screen is placed at the same distance on the other side of the glass. The light is switched on. The magic begins.
Unfortunately, science lessons in schools do not begin in the lab, rather, on a chalkboard. The fast pace of life is no excuse to forget that Newton started thinking about gravity after the apple fell to the ground before him, not the other way round. Everyone with a secondary school education knows that convex lenses converge light rays and concave lenses diverge them. How do they know this? Because they're told. They're told what happens before they had a chance to discover. That's what science has been reduced to. Replication, not discovery. Drab fact regurgitation. Well, close enough.
Think about the description in the first paragraph. When the light was switched on, was there an image on the white screen? Think about the things that could be done with that set-up. Logically. The centrally bulging glass can be replaced by a flat piece, or a centrally thinning one, maybe a wavy one too. Or whatever else. The screen and box can be moved relative to the centrally-placed glass. The screen could be moved to the other side with the box as well! If the image caught is enlarged or shrinking, the trends can be recorded- where does the image start shrinking? At what distance from the glass piece are the screen and light box? Are they on the same side, or opposite sides of the glass? Granted, it'll take longer to beat well-established facts out of schoolchildren. What is harder to fathom however, is that the widespread understanding of the delivery of science and mathematics education has come to mean anything but self-discovery? And frankly, even if that comes at the cost of knowing lesser stuff within the same period of time, it would be totally worth it. How logic has come to be divorced from science, I don't know and couldn't care less about. What I do care about is why it should be rectified, and how.
A widely (and yet not widely enough) circulated little paper of the nature of school education is Lockhart's Lament (PDF file: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf). I came across this wonderful piece of work a year ago, and re-discovered it in my pile of keepsakes a few days ago. Curious about the man who spoke about the flaws of current school education in a manner similar to my own thoughts, I google-d Paul Lockhart. Not the astronaut. Paul is a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York. His article has been circulating through math-ed communities since 2002, but he never published it. It is one of the best critiques of current K-12 mathematics education, made no less important by the fact that it has been written by a first-class research mathematician who elected to devote his career to teaching schoolchildren.
What drew me to his work was the utter semblance of what he said with my own experience and consequential understanding of learning science. Having come from an Indian school before I went to McGill for a Bachelors, I can safely say that I was in a deep rut when it came to understanding science, particularly biology. See, Indians make for amazing workers. Only the Asians could give us any competition in clocking study hours. We have tiny, error-laden textbooks, and 3-4 reference books that are so humongous that the only way they can fit into a book bind that isn't breaking apart is to have ultra-thin pages with alphanumeric page numbers. The easiest way to kill, KILL, our own version of O and A-levels is to work on over 20 past exams per subject. While this needn't necessarily involve rote learning, there are no traces of independent thought. Shame.
The average science student is first compelled to do full-blown independent work at the graduate level. Through schooling and undergraduate years, they can slip conveniently through the cracks of small-scale independent work, failure at which can be more than compensated by the fact and formula-based tests and exams. Even labs are a sham. Independent work, with less reading and more hands-on lab or field work, and informal sit-down sessions with the professor where ideas are beaten out...these should be the foci of primary testing. Having no background in the variety of education systems of the world, my viewpoint reflects strictly one side of the argument. It is nonetheless a strong one because if students feel unprepared for the scientific process, or daunted by the seemingly copious work, then there is a serious problem. Education communities should seriously exchange notes and hammer out a feasible and flexible solution that addresses this issue. I wrote notes for students in Physics, Chemistry and Biology as an undergrad, and realized how easy it was for people to get everything they needed to get a 3.0+ GPA without the effort, and honestly, without the fun. So most science graduate students, unless under the tutelage of a phenomenal supervisor, will be left to replicate someone else's study by changing one tiny factor. It's enough to get published in an obscure journal, but what was new? What was learnt?
Science is about progressing, in painfully slow steps. Not a lot of scientists have leaped, not even most Nobel Laureates. The Nobel-worthy culmination of decades of work starts with an obscure idea that doesn't receive much endorsement. It's only when the results start to show that some support starts to flow in. What about the investment that goes into work before the monetary support? Until results don't show, scientists follow their instincts. Instincts that are obviously based on logic-derived hypotheses. However, given that many logical explanations can be drafted for any phenomenon, trusting one of them to be the focus of your work, is a gut-thing.
Halfway into my flailing research, I was told to look up an alternative, short experiment to complete so I could at least get a publication for all that labour. Last week, the sixth week into perfecting and testing my experiment design, I got a result that gave an indication of the system finally working. No more meter hiccups, no leaking, no dying tadpoles, no clogged tubes, no toppled cages with escaped tadpoles. Nada. One smooth run with distinguishable difference between the two treatments.
Were the fast-piling failures, the uncertainty of the sustenance of the system design, the doubts at probably aiming too far, was it all worth it? Oh Hell yes.
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