Bringing our kids back to the Stone Age

This is my honing stone. 

Before that it was my Mom's. 

Before that it was Grannie's, my Mom's mom.

It has worked, and worked well, for over 50 years, and I expect that it has another half-century left in it.
Behind it is my favorite knife. It is a wedge and a lever, two simple machines. Knives work by separating and ripping through molecules.

I like sharpening my knife. It is an Old World skill. I like the heft of the knife, the sound of steel on stone, the memories of my genetic past that held this same stone.

The honing stone bends the edge of the knife back its ideal position, but at an imperceptible cost.

Over the years, the stone erodes, and each millimeter or two of depression represents years of our lives.

While we spin tales of modern life, urging ourselves to greater heights, rushing through our days, the basics remain (as they ever will) the same.

We eat, we breathe, we grow, we love, we die. The stone connects me to the knife which connects me to the food I will eat. The gap in the stone connects me to my Mom and to her Mom, and will, someday, connect my child to me.

Knives and honing stones are technological wonders. We forget the wonders of steel because so few of us recognize its raw materials, few of us are aware of the tremendous amount of energy needed to create the blade we take for granted. We marvel at high tech machines, yet not one in a thousand of us could make a good steel knife.

If a child cannot sharpen a knife, cannot prepare his own food, cannot imagine the animal slaughtered before it ends up on his table nor the kernel of corn that grew into his corn chips, we are not doing him any favors pushing him into the fantastical world of high tech machines.

Yet that is what we do, every day, in almost every public school.

That stone above will outlive any and all of us.

Science for non-science majors

If a child has an insatiable appetite to learn about the world, to pursue patterns and rhythms in the swirl of sensations slipping into her consciousness each day, then it makes sense to teach her the vocabulary of the trade.

If a child chases the rational world with her eyes alit, then it makes sense to teach her the finer points of microscopy, of calculus, of stoichiometry.

We all love those kids in our classes, because we glow in their light.

That's not why I teach science, though. She doesn't need me, she needs a real scientist. I'm just a teacher.

***

Most kids do not wake up in the morning yearning for more science. Most kids would not set their alarm clocks just to make sure they do not miss a single moment of class. Most kids are still more mammal than machine. These are the kids I teach.

We live in a fantasy world, a culture cocooned from reality by Zoloft, Zelda, and  Catherine Zeta-Jones, a culture where astrology rules over astronomy, where more people believe in Eva Lonoria than evolution.

So where do I start?

Start with a "miracle"--have a child plant a seed, see water fly from flame, listen to his own heart. Have a child stand at the sea's edge as the tide rises over her feet, an ancient arachnid creeping a few yards away from her. Have a child see the moon, see Jupiter, see a falling star.

Then tell science as it developed, stories of greed as humans tried to make gold but made urine glow instead, stories of wonder as humans tried to explain the light of stars and galaxies above, stories of power as humans realized that their models made accurate predictions possible.

Whatever you do, never let a class go by without a few moments of observation that defy intuition, without a story or two about what we thought then, what we think now.

Science is not all flash, but it is all wonder.

We really know nothing at all about what the all is all about. Recognize our children as the magnificent mammals they are,  and we'll have more scientists in this generation. Keep treating them as machines, well, we'll get more of what we have, faces reflected in screens, exchanging life, bit by bit, becoming the ghosts in the machine.

Pad baby by umpcportal, used under CC.