Thinking about Science Education

I've been thinking of science education as I've been reading Mind of a Raven to Jazz, which also could have been called "mind of a scientist." I've realized I never did a lick of real science in school. (Well, OK, in high school my physics and chemistry teacher decided my friend Kris and I were far enough ahead of the class that we could be set free in the lab by ourselves and... we made a bong.) It was all memorization and canned experiments.

Just from having heard Mind of a Raven and not having done the canned science and having the time and space to explore her world, I think Jasmine at 7, is miles ahead (in science)of what I was at anytime during my school career.

I just ran into a paragraph from post an ephinany of the educational kind from Quotidian that brings to my random musings solidity and now I can post this.

Science increasingly found its way into the curriculum to replace the languages, but as many excellent thinkers had prophesied, science as a school subject can't fill a formative goal. No child knows enough math to do "real" science and so he ends up memorizing a bunch of second-hand information that he can never test for himself, and performing contrived demonstrations which are called experiments. Real science can only be evoked in the lower years through nature study and development of the habit of observation.

That's what was at the tip of my thoughts "real science can only be evoked in the lower years through nature study and the development of the habit of observation." Thanks Willa.