Good Idea! Now find a better one.

Why did you go to Elementary School? Middle School? High School? College? Was it to memorize historical dates so you could recall them on demand and demonstrate your intelligence? Was it to memorize equations so you could plug in numbers and get answers from a calculator?

Is the purpose of school to fill the mind or to train the mind? Here are two articles for your consumption:

Physics By Induction: The Genius of Learning Science The Proper Way by Lisa VanDamme
High School Physics: Grade F by David Harriman

Lisa VanDamme and David Harriman argue that High School Physics courses take a lazy route to teaching physics. They fill the students with equations, technologies, laws and principles but do not equip the students with the understanding of the history and process of scientific discovery.

Basic truths about the natural world are offered as a boring list of dogmas, detached from evidence and therefore on a par with the claims of astrologers and psychics.
David Harriman

And why is this bad?

…students leave with the impression that physics is an incomprehensible hash of arbitrary assertions.
David Harriman

Scientific knowledge is presented as a series of commandments rather than as conclusions that have been reached by a laborious process of observation, experiment, and induction. If taught physics this way, a student’s grasp of the principles is necessarily detached from reality.
Lisa VanDamme

Intriguing, no? Look deeper. The problem is more fundamental than just teaching physics. The problem is: Are we learning to think or learning to regurgitate the thinking of others?

Does school foster creative thinking by teaching us to ask questions or stifle our thinking by focusing on answers?

Why do I bring this up? On this blog, we talk about “ideas”. But an idea is just a question. Why does this widget cost so much? Why can’t this service be twice as valuable? What if? Why not? Maybe if…? What if we tried…?

Look at the culture of entrepreneurship in this country, it is built on an army of inquiring minds constantly looking for better ways to do everything.

How many learned to do that in school?