Last week in the waiting room at dance school I had a conversation with a non-Primavera parent.
She is a home-schooler. She claimed to have borrowed ideas on science teaching from the Waldorf curriculum. (Not having read extensively on Waldorf, I don't know how accurately she represents their methods). She said she was intentionally postponing science curriculum until around 9 years old. She continued with an example: if your child sees a shooting star, and asks about it, then your accurate answer might "deaden" the subject by closing it off. And science as a whole was omitted in order to allow the child a few years of thinking about the universe in magical or imaginary ways.
She and a third parent chatted on about how they might avoid "deadening," yet still play out the shooting star question with a "what do YOU think" sort of approach. While I thought this had, as they say in those disastrous job reviews where you can kiss your raise goodbye, room for improvement (see end note), my mind was busy racing off on two tracks: on the one hand, trying to find the gentlest non-confrontational way to steer her to do better, and on the other hand trying to gauge how deeply I disagreed with her.
Forty-eight hours have passed, allowing me to conclude that I disagree fundamentally and viscerally. Let me count the ways:
- An honest answer is not deadening
- There's plenty of wonder to go around
- You are starving your child
- Magical thinking is a gigantic failure
- There's plenty of imagining to do
1. An honest answer is not deadening
The real answer to what is in a shooting star is fascinating in all its details. It raises dozens of additional questions. It opens doors to understanding the universe in ways that never come up in daily life. A chunk of rock travels 100 million light years in total darkness! I never knew anything was so big! Or so many things lie hidden in the sky! It burns up? I never knew rock could burn! I never knew that air resistance, which I feel as gentle breeze, could grow so fierce!
2. There's plenty of wonder to go around
Go ahead and answer your child's question. Even if you satisfy her on the subject of shooting stars, I absolutely, positively, unconditionally guarantee she will be able to find more questions. She will not run out of wonder. Wonder does not have a Peak Oil moment. The supply of questions, and the supply of genuine mysteries to be asked about, will not diminish. As one of my professors cheerfully quipped, when an algorithm seemed to depend on finding and consuming ever huger numbers, "Don't worry. There are plenty more numbers."
Worse: if you dodge or refuse to answer about the shooting star, you are trying to create a sense of wonder by deliberately withholding information – like OPEC trying to increase oil prices by cutting off supply. Now you have created a type of wonder which is of limited supply, a sort of counterfeit wonder which runs out as soon as your control over the market weakens. A poor trade indeed, discarding the infinite for the artificially finite!
3. You are starving your child
Here at Primavera, the Question Box quietly invites the five- to seven-year-olds to ask questions. They respond with a never-ending river of questions. They want to know about plants, bugs, evolution, disease, death, stars, snakes, rocks, metals, fire, molecules, planets, electricity, machines, and rockets . . . and that's only in the first five minutes. They have a huge appetite for knowledge. Omit science from the curriculum, and you starve that appetite. A child grows complete and healthy on a balanced diet whose Food Groups include art, language, writing, social interaction, real world knowledge, story telling, and physical activity. Starve the mind of an entire food group, and expect to harm the growth of the whole.
4. Magical thinking is a gigantic failure
Some abilities come to us naturally. The ability to eat, and enjoy food; the ability to walk and run: we acquire these just by growing in a normal environment. The infant's drive for language acquisition seems to be hard-wired, as does the parents' complementary skill of language teaching.
Other abilities do not come naturally. For example, humans do not seem to have a built-in genetic tendency to read and write. Reading and writing are acquired because adults insist on their acquisition. We deliberately construct the rules, conditions, and actions that support reading and writing.
Scientific thinking is another ability which, uncultivated, can utterly fail to grow. Thousands of years' experience shows that people are quite able to get through life believing the earth is flat, stars are friendly spirits, diseases are caused by vapors, and so on; and they will fail to acquire – indeed, violently reject -- information that is acquired by other means, as witness Galileo's unpleasant experiences with the Inquisition.
Magical thinking, by contrast, seems to occur naturally. When you watch the football game, and clench your fists to give the quarterback extra strength for that critical throw, you are doing magical thinking! It's harmless in sporting events, and may serve nicely as a sort of social bonding technique ("we're all pulling together hoping Johnny passes his exam"). It has real uses, in storytelling, in facing and reconciling one's emotional states. But as a real world problem-solving technique, magical thinking fails over and over. It doesn't build better mousetraps, win or prevent wars, or cure disease (despite numerous attempts, the bubonic plague was never cured by murdering one's local population of Jews). And yet we see magical thinking all around us. My neighbor feels that global warming is probably just part of a natural cycle. Why does he think so? He just sort of feels it must be right. Worse yet, he votes based on his magical conclusions.
Children need to learn a method of thinking with inquiry, observation, and logic. Otherwise they risk growing into handicapped adults who support nutty political schemes, fall for Ponzi scams, buy products that fail to solve problems that didn't exist in the first place, and generally bring danger to themselves and others.
5. There's plenty of imagining to do
A passage from one of Maria Montessori's books explains the importance of imagining in the curriculum. She does not mean a day-dreamy sort of cotton candy and butterflies imagining. I have an uncle in America, she suggests. I have never seen either America or this uncle, but I use the facility of imagination to bring them both into my mind, and to build knowledge around these facts that I cannot observe directly. Imagination, combined with discernible rules about how the universe works, gives us the power to understand the world broadly and deeply: the Keys to the Universe.
Imagining, like wonder, does not have to be parcelled out, and does not have to be enhanced by deliberate ignorance. We do not need to imagine that maybe the shooting star is a sparkling fairy. We can imagine many real things about the shooting star, and we can extend our imagination with more questions – especially if we are confident our teachers will support us with all the knowledge we ask for.
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Endnote: "what do YOU think the shooting star is". This is an unfair response to the child. You are taunting her by refusing to divulge information. She does not know the answer, and she does not have a plausible way of guessing or inferring the answer. Your refusal to answer is like bringing dinner to table and then forcing the hungry child to wait, not allowed to eat until you finish your weird quiz game. Worse: by demanding an answer from her, you've suddenly put her under uncomfortable pressure -- even guaranteed her failure, because of course she has no way to provide the right answer.
We in Science Specialist class often respond to a question with "what do YOU think", but only in circumstances where the knowledge generally available, plus application of creative reasoning, might yield an answer: as in, "why do YOU think the dolphin needs to swim extremely fast?".
