5 ms·

Our public education in the U.S. is a travesty. There's really no incentive to remain up-to-date on information, and it seems to be getting worse.

• mncharity 5y ago
  An educator suggests[1], in the context of preK science education, that students have a human right to make sense of their world "now". That's very not the focus of current science education content. PreK-13. But what if were? What might that look like? Status quo is students being told the Sun is yellow, from preK on through to the most common intro astronomy college textbooks, with only a few of them getting an "oops, nope, our bad" decades later, in astronomy graduate school discussion of common misconceptions in astronomy education. We've known Sun color for a century, had detailed limb darkening and tint numbers for decades, and now years of intensive effort on stellar atmospheres in support of occultation and exoplanet work. Also years of hemispherical-camera daytime-sky surveys. And science education content manages to remain decoupled from all of that. A startup pivoted from supporting learning of English in Japan, because the market there turned out to be for performance on English proficiency exams, not for English fluency. And a teacher remarked that it seemed the societal objective was English accessibility for work, while avoiding the fluency which could contaminate culture. Similarly, an truly excellent briefing on biology would necessarily be pervasively steeped in evolution... and thus be less than entirely welcome in the US. Not that Europe or Russia, or China, India, or Brasil, have incentivized its creation either. It seems neither the science research nor science education communities are set up to pursue it. [1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Larimore+Vision+2020 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Larimore+Vision+2020