On one hand, science should be taught as an art. It is a creative endeavor, and when well-taught it engages the mind naturally. Why aren't we asking these kids what interests them and helping them apply the appropriate science?
On the other hand, science is incredibly useful and necessary to understand the world today, and fix the bugs in our social systems that otherwise are or will cause human suffering.
I think finding a handful of heroes to fix all our problems is dumb. We are at a point where fulfilling the greatest potential of all humans should be the goal of any thoughtful person.
Let people fix their own problems, but also let them borrow your tools. And science is an amazingly cool set of tools for fixing things.
I wouldn't expect an 8-year-old to 'evaluate the trustworthiness of a source', but I think that that's not what is actually expected of the students, and that it's just the parent trying to shoehorn in everything an adult is supposed to do when researching.
Luckily that set of adults did not include my own parents, who thought it would be fun to have a full encyclopedia at home, and I got pulled in by it no less than Wikipedia sometimes pulls me in, in adulthood.
Very spot on.
"Last year my son, who was in third grade at the time, came home with a sheet of paper from his school that listed three categories for appropriate projects: developing a hypothesis and conducting an experiment to test that theory, inventing something new, or researching 'something specific.' The guidelines listed 'whales' as an example of something specific. Given that my son was 8 years old, the idea that he could, on his own, do any single one of these things seemed ludicrous."
Ok, so here we have a parent which completely doubts what their kid can do. In my experience this is a pretty bad place for a parent to be, as the kids seem to always be more capable than parents expectation.
But the author really drives it home here:
"Even the easiest of these items—researching a topic—is nearly impossible for a child who hasn’t yet mastered the ability to browse the Internet. (As a parent and the founder of a tech company, I’ve observed that in order to browse the Internet one needs to know how to scan the screen, differentiate between actual content and ads, and evaluate the trustworthiness of a resource—elements that are far out of reach of most 8-year-olds.)"
Get that? Browse the Internet? Here is a question, how hard is it to pick up the volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica with the big "W" on the spine and turn to the page on "Whales" ? Not that hard. I'm sure the problem with that is that an 8 year old cannot be expected to drive themselves to the library. (only half joking).
But in context it says volumes about the parent and very little about the child. Even the poorest child can research things like the kinds of insects that live in their neighborhood. The sad part about this article is not that Science Fairs are not fair, its that parents don't know what science is and so cannot help there children develop a sense of wonder and discovery.
And what is truly heartbreaking for me is that the author's child has no hope of learning what science is from this person, and if they don't get it in school, well they will grow up believing anything they read on the Internet as truth. That makes for a very sad story indeed.