The Future of Education

The fractured presentation of scientific information throughout most schooling is like an erupting volcano that happens to be spewing disconnected factoids instead of fire, sparks, and magma. People dislike science because they are bombarded with vocabulary and tested with lower order questions that depend mostly on rote learning. Even with the prescribed curricula and standardized exams in many countries, the emphasis is on canonical information in each discipline rather than a theme that unifies the natural sciences. How can we be surprised that scientific literacy is lacking at the global level when we seem to have lost sight of why humans originally started using scientific thinking? It is possible to unify the basic natural sciences of astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science and physics. An uncomplicated theoretical framework can give a complete picture of the natural world and make the crucial connections between these disciplines. This is a scheme that expands and builds upon an idea from biological science which organizes the breadth of its content into levels of organization from biomes down to biochemicals. With an upper end point of the universe as ‘the totality of the natural world’ levels of astronomical and earth science ideas are arranged in a hierarchy based on physical size stepping down to the living world. Below the smallest biological category, matter is arranged into decreasing chemical models, and finally physics is depicted as energy covering forces and motion down to phases of electromagnetic radiation as waves. This arrangement of some thirty levels of organization as explanations of those sciences is usually a linear arrangement. It can also be demonstrated in a circle with the inherent connection between physics and astronomy linking the smallest to the largest ideas. Thus, the focus is on the natural world as seen through the lens of the basic sciences. Education in any language could be age-appropriate versions starting with something as simple as sky-earth-habitat-creatures-food-energy when children enter school. Curricula could introduce complexity in a manner that builds new information into this existing conceptual framework, just as constructivist learning theory suggests. Rather than placing emphasis on over-simplified versions of ‘what scientists do’ as the nature of science, emphasis can be on a single collective picture of ‘what scientists know’ in this depiction of nature. The important findings of each of those different subject areas fit together as neatly as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Of course, the beauty of science is that some parts of the puzzle remain to be discovered.

Keywords: Science Education, Conceptual Understanding, Nature of Science;

References: [missing]