Of late, there has been a lot of talk about handling science education in more effective ways. A very popular notion is to make science fun by designing toys and games that would help children learn scientific principles while they are playing. Another related approach is to emphasize on learning by experiments; and there has been a lot of investment in designing simple experiments and offering to schools, teachers or directly to children as kits. Experiments provide an opportunity to see what they've been taught, and when a principle is visually demonstrated to us, it not only gets recorded more firmly in our brains, it also helps us go beyond and think further.
I don't disagree with effectiveness of the above approaches, and they are indeed better than just reading books. And they do offer stimulus to spark the most powerful tool every human being has - the imagination.
The greatest discoveries of science were made in last 4 centuries, especially before we even had cinema or computing machines. The kind of theories scientists of those times came up with through observation, imagination and extrapolation were simply mind-boggling. There was of course a lot of experimentation as well that was done to test hypotheses, but it was secondary, although inevitable and extremely important, step in my view.
Each one of the 3 primary and core activities - Observation, Imagination, Extrapolation - were performed by these scientists with some level of artistry. For the mind to look deeper into what the eyes see, imagine to look beyond what the eyes have no opportunity to see, letting the mind wander and decide what's that beyond which is worth going after, and then applying all the tools one has, and inventing what one doesn't, to mentally transport oneself to the version of reality that the mind has created for itself, a version carefully fine-tuned to adhere to all earthly laws so as to be real even outside the boundaries of the mind and in the real world - it's art of the finest kind that humans are capable of.
I therefore believe that if the ultimate goal is to encourage scientific pursuit, one must focus on these 3 fundamental faculties in children or adults - Observation, Imagination and Extrapolation. With all the mental clutter that has resulted from heavy doses of social media and heavily messy internet, we have lost the finesse we once had in exactly these abilities. And to bring us back from there or to protect our children from messing up their clean-slates is becoming extremely difficult and complicated. Complicated - because the internet is like one of the fundamental realities of our lives now. It's the source of all good and all bad, and our lives rely heavily on it. But if humanity were to see the kind of scientific endeavor it once did, we have to overcome the clutter and develop a learning system that sharpens and enhances these faculties to a very high degree - Observation, Imagination and Extrapolation.
