High school science education needs to be reformed
Dear Editor,
I am a former top student at A levels who has studied physics on scholarship in the United States. I recently started teaching at the Business School. I know that our Guyanese students are bright and can do great things if given proper guidance, however I am convinced that our students’ full potential is not being unleashed to create geniuses who can think creatively and solve unfamiliar problems. Too much emphasis is being placed on terminology and too little on the intricate mechanisms that underlie the workings of the universe. For example most students have an idea how to find the area of a triangle and circle and to do calculations regarding Pythagoras’ Theorem. However if I place three
identical coins on a table so that each touches the rim of the other two and ask them to find the area of the central region they are stumped utterly unable to use what they know to creatively solve the problem.
When I was in form one at the Bishops’ High School I was told by my science teacher that the curved surface of water in a measuring cylinder is called the meniscus. I was disappointed because that’s not much science. It’s just the name of something and the teacher never went further. I had to learn on my own the interesting stuff about why the surface is curved based on the forces between molecules. Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once said that there is a difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. For example knowing that DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid is not really knowing anything. But consider this: in a piece of meat the amino acids are arranged in a particular sequence and when digested the amino acids separate and reconstitute in a new sequence unique to the human. If you understand how DNA encodes the information to allow this then you really know something. That’s what real science is about mechanisms not terminology and “big words”. Terminology, is only important for communication between scientists. At the high school level the emphasis should be on mechanisms that illustrate the beauty of science.
Science education in the Caribbean is far behind the rest of the world. The Caribbean has never won a Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry while nearly twenty Japanese have won prizes in these disciplines combined. The reason? The Japanese education system is geared towards the cultivation of genius. Mathematics exams are routinely filled with unorthodox and difficult problems while at CSEC they are doing standard textbook problems. How do you create a Nobel Prize winner? By the time the student is twelve they should have mastered standard Algebra and Geometry so the next few years can be spent on complicated, unorthodox problems that train the mind to solve scientific riddles. This is how Pakistani Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam was able to write his first scientific paper at the age of seventeen on a difficult problem posed by the Indian Math genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Please indulge me in one final illustration. When a particle collides elastically and obliquely with another of equal mass at rest then the particles move off along paths that are perpendicular. This is a beautiful fact with ramifications in nuclear physics. But how does one prove mathematically that the paths are perpendicular? I recently saw a YouTube video where a professor proved it in fifteen minutes using an inelegant method and a plethora of confusing variables. Well I can do it in an easily understandable way in less than on minute. I am the only man who can reform high school science education in Guyana and bring it to the level that can produce world class scientific thinkers. I see clearly the changes that need to be made. As a small step in that direction I intend on having a science programme on television. If anyone is interested in sponsoring this or needs tutoring please Whatsapp 652 0989.
Yours faithfully
Adrian Roopnarine