Seriously, if successful science learning depends on either having a one-in-a-million instructor or being a one-in-50,000 student, there would seem to be little hope of communicating meaningful science to the population at large.
If it is not possible for a curriculum to make a difference, we're left with little to talk about. The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman
But don't listen to me, my own science education was clearly an abysmal failure. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
What I'd like to see is much more appreciation of critical thinking, trial and error - no, you don't get the answer right the first time - and the empirical method applied to processes and situations from everyday life, rather than being reserved for lab situations with ripple tanks and oscilloscopes and other doodads and thingummies.
Understanding science as policy direction is possibly more useful than optics to most people.
And (see Feyerabend) "the method" is not what elementary science books teach in their "scientific method" chapters (another example of good curriculum destroyed by rote and bad teaching) but rather a critical-thinking attitude to problem solving. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
