If you feel intimidated when thinking about teaching science to your children, you are not alone. Most of us have been conditioned to see the subject as complicated and beyond the reach of average people.
Today we’re going to unwrap science and remove the layers of hype.
I am going to share some information with you that will help you see things from a totally different perspective. When I am done you will be able to relax and enjoy homeschooling with your children more than ever before!
- We are going to describe what the word “science” means, and how we practice the scientific method daily without realizing it.
- We’re going to go back in time and expose the original intents behind compulsory education’s approach to science.
- Then next podcast we are going to suggest ways academic science can be approached so that it is more in line with God’s original ideas of “Observe, Think, and Do.”
Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise,
Proverbs 6:6
This post is actually just one in a list of posts which deals with what I like to call the “Four Pillars” of true education, which are:
- Gaining Favor With God and Man (relationship with God and others, along with character, habits, etc.)
- The Tools of Learning (reading, writing and arithmetic)
- Content (history, science, et al)
- Application (taking what we know and putting it to use)
There are a number of ways to look at what we call “science.”
The first way we have been taught to see it is as:
…a systematic discipline that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe.
The second way is to see it as:
A systematic method or body of knowledge in a given area.
But there is a third way, a more colloquial, common-sense way that we need to see it from; ingenuity.
If we really want to break things down to their bare basics, we can see the subject of science as this:
People observe how things work, they think about them, then they come to some conclusions about all they have observed and thought, and then they take actions based on their conclusions, and sometimes those actions end up proving or disproving their theories, and often lead to innovation in different realms of human existence or experience.
I know science conjures up in our minds a picture of people in white coats in a laboratory, but it’s actually more about a woman in a brightly covered apron figuring out how to make a full meal on a tight budget, or a man in jeans and t-shirt figuring out how to keep rain water from seeping into his basement.
Yes, there are textbooks offered which require hugely expensive scientific-looking lab equipment to complete, but they aren’t really, truly teaching the heart of science. Most science curriculum focuses on transmitting innocuous information and procedure, but not in such a way as to encourage ambition on the part of the learner. It is more about creating cogs in the wheels of industry than innovators.
Science taught in this way goes against the intent of God for human beings.
In effect, we are all scientists in one way or another and have been since birth. If you have ever
had a problem and needed to come up with a practical solution and then tried all kinds of possible outcomes until you found an answer that really worked, even without realizing it, you were practicing the scientific method! Even infants have to solve problems this way– have you ever watched a tiny baby try to put a cookie into his mouth for the first time?
As a matter of fact, science is one of the easiest of the subjects. Easy because children don’t need to be prodded or goaded into learning about the world in which they live.
(It’s as if God created human beings to investigate and find things out about their world so they could have fun channeling His genius in nature to the benefit of mankind. It seems as if He delights in our discoveries. Imagine that!)
As Johannes Keppler is quoted:
“O God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee.”
Gathering, observing, hypothesizing, and experimenting are all scientific exercises. All children do these things naturally every day. We just take their natural inclinations and hone them so they become more refined and useful.
This is so simple, simple, simple! It takes an academic scholar goosed along by a social engineer to misunderstand it!
But that’s just what those in power have been doing; those in power have been attempting to use social engineering to convince us we do not have the ability to innovate and make positive changes that really matter because we aren’t “qualified.”
Why? Because those who make billions off of our ignorance cannot stand any competition.
- If electricity could be gathered from the air, where would the energy industries be?
- If cancer could be reversed by a simple regimen, where would all of the providers for radiation treatment and chemotherapy be?
- If cars could run on water, where would the oil industry be?
When we consider these things, it makes sense that people in charge of compulsory education would want to condition children from an early age that they must not think of themselves as scientists. It only follows that science would become so parochial that it discourages all ingenious thought.
I don’t want you to think that I gathered this theory from some vague place in my own brain or some grey matter on social media somewhere, so I will offer you an actual quote or two (and there are a million more where these came from which convey much the same thought).
The first is from James Russell, Dean of Columbia Teachers College in his address to the National Education Association national convention in 1908:
How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to rouse ambitions and aspirations in the oncoming generations which…cannot possibly be fulfilled?….How can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be leaders? Is human nature so constituted that those who fail will readily acquiesce in the success of their rivals?
Here is a small bit of JT Gatto’s analysis of the history of American education which also serves to illustrate this point (from his book, The Underground History of American Education):
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called “the workforce.” Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you’re a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a “gifted and talented” label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by “proper” social order.
Can you see it?
There really is a “they,” although there are different forms of they in different sectors, and the reason they seem so coordinated as if there was a conspiracy is because they are all affected and driven by the same mortal sin; pride.
And pride brings just about every other foible with it; jealousy, greed, and every other evil work.
Thomas Malthus expressed this in his heinous works on population growth in which he suggested we encourage the death of the poor via dire living conditions which would increase death due to malnutrition and disease.
Then there are those who followed, such as Margaret Sanger who wrote, “the most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.” Even the well-thought-of Jacques Cousteau (beloved oceanographer of television fame in the late 1900’s) wrote in the UNESCO Courier in November 1991:
we must eliminate 350,000 people per day…This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation…is lamentable.
The “science” we are supposed to teach our children is not to prepare them for ingeniously navigating through life and discovering the glory of God in His creation; it is all about preparing them to fit neatly into the plan of those at the top of the food chain.
I know this sounds bleak and dark, but there is something to keep in mind here:
JESUS IS LORD!
His Kingdom is not hampered by all of the prideful ponderings of those who would try and build a realm on earth without Him.
And, if we are in league with the Master, we are not hampered, either.
Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18
Our job as parents is to teach our children the heart of “science” through a Biblical lens, then prepare them for whatever God has for them in the future; even if it is by using the system already set up, but harnessing it for the glory of God.
Here is an illustration of this from Gatto:
It is ironic from a contrarian viewpoint that the most prestigious scientific position in the world today is surely heading up the human genome project, and that project, as I write, is in the hands of a born-again Christian. Corporations are lined up all the way to China to make fortunes out of genetic manipulation. The director of that project is a man named Dr. Francis S. Collins, who, according to The New York Times, personally recognizes religion as the most important reality in his life. Collins was reared in an agnostic home in western Virginia where he was homeschooled by his outspoken, radical mother who stretched the school law in a number of ways to give him an education. [He was homeschooled.] While in medical school, he came to the conclusion that he would become a born-again Christian because the decision was “intellectually inescapable.” And he has maintained that faith energetically ever since, a decision that makes his professional colleagues very uncomfortable.
I know you’re thinking this is all fine and dandy, but just how are we supposed to go about teaching science this way to our children?
So glad you asked that question, because the answers are quite liberating.
Until then, I would like to leave you a quote from a fellow named Percy W. Bridgman in his essay “On the Scientific Method” in the book Reflections of a Physicist in 1955:
[the working scientist] is…not consciously following any prescribed course of action, but feels complete freedom to utilize any method or device whatever which in the particular situation before him seems likely to yield the correct answer. No one standing on the outside can predict what the individual scientist will do or what method he will follow. In short, science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.
And there are as many ways to tackle teaching science to our children as there are individual families.
In my next post I hope to share the different ways to go about fostering curiosity, awe, and usefulness into the science we teach our children at home.
Until then, if you would like to listen to this post as a podcast (with all the perquisites of things my quirky personality adds in) please click below:
Mom Delights on iTunes
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