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Monday, 9:35 am in Politics & Current Affairs

ACADEMICS quoted by Justine Ferrari are missing the mark completely when they say that focusing on “everyday science rather than textbook theory” in the classroom is the answer to restoring a 20-year deficit in scientific knowledge.

Pandering to fickle teenagers by making science courses more palatable to them is a nice idea but will not raise the level of science knowledge in our nation. Science is best learned in a disciplined way. This is never popular with teenagers.

Quoted From: The Australian Letters Column (emphasis mine)

So there’s this debate that’s been getting a bit of media coverage recently about the lack of Australian science graduates, and the fact that the university entrance score for said subjects is so low.¹  As usual, a vast proportion of the blame for the lack of interest in science (and maths; the one subject that is even less glamorous) is doled out to teenagers.  They are, of course, always too interested in doing their nails or updating their MySpace or watching Big Brother to bother about intellectual pursuits.

Yeah,  right.  Of course they are.  I’m not even going to go into the fact that it’s hardly the fault of a bunch of fifteen year-olds that they society they’ve grown up in has been slowly and insidiously dumbed down by postmodern fatuousness since the 1980s.  It’s not their fault that their parents are the vapid, ignorant, fearful SUV-and-McMansion owning ‘Aspirational Voters’.  It’s not their fault that they’ve grown up in a political climate where the term ‘intellectual’ is slung about as an insult and vapid capitalist princesses and turkey-slapping reality-TV apes are lauded as cultural heroes.

No, instead I’m going to blame you Mr. High-School-Science-Teacher-Letter-Writer.  It’s your job to teach these kids science; it’s only a handful of years since I was sitting in a high school science classroom myself, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that teenagers can smell your contempt of them a mile off.  Maybe it’s your attitude – and ability as a teacher – that’s turning your kids off.

Teenagers can be extremely disciplined when they encounter something that interests them.  Whether its playing guitar or drawing manga or practising football or coding meticulous XHTML or spending hours fragging noobs.  Just because you might not consider that these tasks require ‘disciplined learning’ doesn’t mean that they don’t.  The ability is there; if you don’t know how to use it, that’s your own fault.

It’s time to get a new scapegoat.

1. For those readers who Aren’t From Around Here; the UAI score required to get into any one course at uni is based primarily on supply and demand, not on how hard the course actually is.  Obviously the UAI that you personally earn at the end of high school (or college) is based on how well you passed your exams (or assignments) and therefore theoretically a reflection on how smart you are.  However, if everyone wants to get in Fashion Design and no-one wants to do Science, then it’s the former that’s going to have the 97.4 entry requirement.  It’s called market forces; hey, you introduced it. ^

• Tags » articles, australia, current affairs, letters to the editor, politics, science