The Art of Teaching Science

3 Pages 757 Words

In the essay, “The Art of Teaching Science,” by Lewis Thomas, he talks about our failures in the way we teach science in our education system. Lewis believes that schools have gone about teaching science in the entirely wrong way and that they need to go about it in a totally new perspective changing the whole way we teach it in our classrooms, from a boring old subject, to a fun and exciting class that will interest much more future scientists.
Thomas went over many of the ways we fail to teach science in our education system. He argued that we taught science as if we knew all of our knowledge about science was true, even though we continually change and update it, and that science has the answer for all there is to know about the world and how it works. Science doesn’t admit to ever being wrong or needing more information about something before it can know for sure, it describes everything as if it is the final and true answer to all that we ever wanted to know. When we teach science in this fashion, we lose people’s interest in it.
Lewis believes this way of teaching it doesn’t leave our youth the need to become the next generation scientist or to figure out all the many things that science has not yet uncovered about our world. If science has already done all that it can, then why should anyone new be interested in becoming a scientist? This, Lewis says, is what turns so many people off the subject of science and is why we need to reinvent the way we teach it.
Thomas comes up with many different and interesting ideas on how we can change the way we teach science. He doesn’t want us to learn science as if it was learning a new language; once you learn the language, that is all to learn about it and that is that. He says the same for learning history, “History, once learned, was history.” He wants science to be taught as if there is an endless amount of new things to learn about our world. It is our job as the...