Blog prompt #3

Why do kids stop liking science after a point? Between preschool and middle school, what drives them away from it?

Now, I've done no research on this topic at all, so I can only speak from experience on what might drive children away from the love of science, dinosaurs, and space that they culture and nurture when they are young. I know I certainly wanted to be a firefighting astronaut who ran to save the day riding a stegosaurus. But after a point, for most of us, that changes. Its not a matter of one single factor that drives children away from that love of science, but many. For example, elementary school through middle school is five to eight years of being bludgeoned over the head with a science book that says the same basic things in different, fancier language as you go on. Very few children get to simply study dinosaurs, or space, or cars - we all get the same generic run that covers many subjects in little detail. That in turn means that we can't find those interesting little facts that really keep someone interested in whatever branch of science they may be interested in. To top that off, theres a never ending parade of useless things that get thrown at us over the course of our childhood school careers. For example, one memorable instance for me was in my sixth grade "science" class. I can't remember what the technical name of the class was, but one would expect that you would do something interesting once you've gotten into your teenage years, and made it to middle school. We did nothing more interesting than heating water in that class, and nothing resembling an experiment in detail. But the point is, at the end of that class we were given the grades for all the assignments we'd turned in for the course of the marking period. I got mine back, and one was mysteriously absent, taking ten points away from my grade. I asked what this was, knowing that I had turned them in. I was told that You were supposed to take notes on everything we did in class; you were told that the first day. And I had. But apparently he had been counting that first day on how to take notes something that we were supposed to take notes on and turn in. That was the missing ten points.

Even as we continue through the "science" education we get in our younger years, we hit high school. In abstract, we've learned almost nothing except that science is there to screw us over, and we've lost any desire to really attempt. The "experiments" that we get to do once we hit high school even are hardly experiments - we're told the expected results, even if we don't achieve them.

If children were given more variety to find their own interests over the course of their school lives, we might have a following of science once again. People might still be able to name all the kinds of dinosaurs, even if scientists could agree whether or not some exist, or whether or not the planets we learned in grade school are all still planets. For all we know, within the next few years they could decide that Jupiter isn't in fact a planet, but a "large semi autonomously operating gas compression unit" or something equally self important sounding.

I think if journalistic science writers, like those we see in Kaku's "best science writing of 2012" were allowed to write the textbooks we teach kids out of, then maybe more would be interested, maybe more would keep that spark. Alternatively, if more Mythbusters was shown in science class, I think we'd all be a lot better off for science. Or more interested, whichever comes first.