Life in optical

The only way to make ‘development’* sustainable, is to make sure there are people to keep it up and keep developing.

This means making sure that there are people in developing countries who can initiate new developments from scratch, thereby ensuring that the society is flexible and creative in the face of the “only constant in life: change” and consequently who can also take over whatever developments that have been brought there by the outside world, maintain them, improve them, etc.

So what’s the best way to reach that? It’s to have a good education. I’m not talking Ivy league for the few. I mean a good educational grounding given to all.

What this entails is learning to think. Not learning things by heart. In my book learning ridiculous amounts by heart is equivalent to brain washing, unless you are a law student or a medical student and you really need to have an encyclopedia in your head to perform your job.

Learning to think.

What is it that teaches us to think like nothing else? Science.

Science is inquisitive, it is deductive, it is rational, it has a language that makes reasoning something that can be done by groups of people (maths). And if you think about it for a minute, that’s the sort of learning we need to survive.

Toddlers need to acquire the skills to be independent. How do they do that? They prod and push, and touch and pull, and taste, and ‘gaah’ at, in an attempt to see how things in their environment react, how they work. Based on this they learn how the world works:

If I let go of my spoon, the food falls on the ground and I go hungry. Every time. I’ve learnt that and I don’t have a word for it but in adult-speak, I’ve just learnt gravity.

That’s science for you. Science is the first thing we do as babies to learn to be independent. The more science we know, the more resourceful we are. That’s not because we have a better brain than others, it’s simply because we have learnt to use that brain. We have learnt to think.

William Kamkwamba is one of those people who logically put A + B together and generated electricity for his house, and now he has become a worldwide celebrity**.

So if applying the scientific method in life is so helpful, then that is what we should teach in our schools, right? We should have good science education.

Now there we have a problem. Science education, that’s scary! No primary school teacher became a primary school teacher because they liked science. Primary school teachers became primary school teachers because they liked children; anyone liking science is supposed to become a scientist or an engineer or something like that. So we need to change the image of science, especially science education!

Imagine this. You are in a classroom and you are supposed to teach something that you feel extremely insecure about, and that you don’t really like, and that you always found boring when you were a school pupil yourself. What do you do? You rely on the text book. You regurgitate what’s in the book and don’t allow anyone to stray from the path given by the book because you don’t know what’s there. And fair enough, I would do the same. But science cannot possibly be confined to a book! Moreover, that’s not going to teach anyone science, that’s the same as the brain-washing as above, and it’s only going to perpetuate the feeling you had when you were in that classroom and your teacher tried to make you learn what you think is science. Not cool.

By the way, I know of schools that are dedicated to sticking to exactly what’s written in a book and where straying from the narrow path set out by the book is reprimanded. Does it remind you of something?…

Let’s get back to why science is this cool thing that equips us for life. Science is inquisitive. It is reliable – you can reproduce things that work endless times. It is experimental, it is speculative and it evolves! If something doesn’t work, then you have to change our understanding of it. It teaches you flexibility.

And that’s where hands-on science education comes in. It’s not in a book. It’s not a demonstration that kids witness passively. It’s doing it. Kids doing what they’ve been doing since they were babies. The only difference is, they are given specific setups to do it with, which are chosen so that new subjects and new properties about the world around them can be discovered. It’s guided discovery, but it remains discovery. And it’s fun.

Back to the teacher. Something like this can’t be improvised. Teachers can’t just go ahead and set up experiments. And lab gear is expensive! Well, let’s break another misconception here. If science is what babies do in everyday life, it means that science is everywhere. Not only in expensive, specifically tailored equipment that can only be bought form commercial companies… And some people have dedicated their lives to showing precisely that, and to making such resources available to teachers and to kids.

One of those is Arvind Gupta an all his resources are available for free on his website. And remember – Free does not mean of low quality! In fact, these are great for children’s curiosity, unlike most formal education curricula.

So if that’s what science is, that’s what we need to put in schools. And yes, it is possible to ‘just do it’. Everything is out there. Now what we need is for society to value thinking and teachers – and for teachers to value science. There is a long way to go but it can be done. Anyone who trusts that thinking is the way forward, please help. Say it. Do it. Be an example. Value teachers for what they bring (children’s education!), value science for what it brings (thinking!), do it demonstratively and the rest will come…

The bottom line is – make sure kids keep exploring the world! Science is not confined, science is the real world, and science equips for thinking.
Science fertilizes the mind.

Teachers – give them guidance but don’t be afraid of not knowing! Let them go, and follow them yourself. You are not a preacher; you are a guide, an igniter and a safety net.

The goal is not to bring children up to where you know they can be and stop there. The goals is to take our imperfect tools to equip kids to discover new worlds of knowledge so that what they teach their own kids brings them even further.

(*): I put quotes around the word development because it is often seen as: Let us put a bridge between two towns separated by a river, then there will be trade between those towns and the economy will grow and [insert all the other expectations that 'development' carries with it]. I personally think this is an antiquated view of development, which is why I use quotes. What I mean with development is stuff for another blog post. Let’s just say for the sake of this post that I’m aiming for a skilled, flexible and creative society, able to tackle challenges and minimise the impact that world problems (disease, environment, economy, resources) has on it.

(**): What William Kamkwamba has done is brilliant, and should be lauded – but isn’t it terribly patronising of a society that just buys and consumes and generally doesn’t display much resourcefulness on average – to be so surprised that he is so clever … because he doesn’t have much? I would like to see those who have the opportunity of good education actually use it sometimes instead of remaining idle and then congratulating someone like William with misplaced superiority… But that’s a whole other debate.

this is how it reads:

”
It is important to maintain a basic competence in flagship sciences such as physics and astronomy for cultural reasons. Not to offer them would be to take a negative view of our future, the view that we are a second class nation, chained forever to the treadmill of feeding and clothing ourselves.
”

And they have proved that they can follow this up by building a 10-metre class telescope (SALT) or bidding to host the biggest scientific facility ever planned (on Earth) (SKA), and making every effort to build the capacity to use those facilities (NASSP) and make everyone benefit form them (SCBP).

If carried out like that, astronomy is very good news for any country.

Source: White Paper on Science & Technology, Department of Arts, Culture, Science And Technology , South Africa, 1996. (PDF, 1.1 MB)

There was a more recent Troposphère V too but it didn’t succeed as well as this one. Unfortunately the media reports of Troposphère V were a bit too obvious in not taking these guys seriously. But come on – who do you know who can launch powdered-milk cans 1500 metres into the air, and have their minister of science and technology applaud it (with reason)? This is great stuff, people: the combination of technological innovation with recycling.

Who said sustainable development was rocket science? :)