Mark Frauenfelder asks us to imagine a school where the kids learn by doing projects like these:
clone jellyfish DNA; build gadgets to measure the electrical impulses of cockroach neurons; make robotic blackjack dealers; design machines that can distinguish between glass, plastic, and aluminum beverage containers and sort them into separate bins; and convert gasoline-burning cars to run on electric power.
No such school exists, but the kids who showed up to the recent Maker Faire had done just those things, and learning by doing is a wonderful way to learn:
The ideal educational environment for kids, observes Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College who studies the way children learn, is one that includes “the opportunity to mess around with objects of all sorts, and to try to build things.” Countless experiments have shown that young children are far more interested in objects they can control than in those they cannot control—a behavioral tendency that persists. In her review of research on project-based learning (a hands-on, experience-based approach to education), Diane McGrath, former editor of the Journal of Computer Science Education, reports that project-based students do as well as (and sometimes better than) traditionally educated students on standardized tests, and that they “learn research skills, understand the subject matter at a deeper level than do their traditional counterparts, and are more deeply engaged in their work.” In The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely, a behavioral psychologist at Duke University, recounts his experiments with students about DIY’s effect on well-being and concludes that creating more of the things we use in daily life measurably increases our “feelings of pride and ownership.” In the long run, it also changes for the better our patterns of thinking and learning.
Unfortunately, says Gray, our schools don’t teach kids how to make things, but instead train them to become scholars, “in the narrowest sense of the word, meaning someone who spends their time reading and writing. Of course, most people are not scholars. We survive by doing things.”
Peter Drucker, the seminal writer on management and society, was a strong advocate of teaching arts & crafts in elementary school.
Professor Drucker never forgot the woodworking class he had taken in the 4th grade in Austria. He was not very good at it, but it gave him a lifelong appreciation for craftsmanship.
I would also argue that lab science, involving actual experiments rather than computer simulations, is essential in developing an understanding of which science is really about — “you can always see for yourself” rather than the authoritarianism of “scientists say.”