I had the very great pleasure to teach Colin while he was in high school. A more thoughtful student would be hard to find. He is now studying neuroscience at Duke. Below is an excerpt from Colin's paper which can be read in its entirety at the following link: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cmartz/case-earlier-neuroscience-education-plus-resources-educators-who-believe-me. You will find there a very helpful list of resources for educators who want to put Colin's ideas into practice.
To begin, I would like to describe my personal relationship with science education from the 6th grade to the 12th grade. Now, bear in mind that I was fortunate enough to attend a well-funded college preparatory school for these years, so my case is far from representative of the average American education. Nevertheless, for the majority of my high school career, I wanted nothing to do with science. I derived little pleasure from balancing chemical equations or learning about photosynthesis, and I dreaded the introduction of each new topic in my calculus class. On the other hand, I loved my English classes, largely because the readings and discussions they entailed shed light on just how rich, diverse and nuanced peoples thoughts and experiences could be. Science classes were always so abstract and detached from everything I learned through my own experiences in the world. I had nothing tangible to connect each new concept to, and as a result I felt like I was building a whole new world that operated by a series of seemingly arbitrary rules.
Then, during the second semester of my senior year, a teacher introduced me to Roger Sperrys famous research with split-brain patients (see also: http://nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/split-brain/index.html). It was that experience that demonstrated to me how cool science could be; it just had to be directed at something more human and immediately relevant for me to appreciate it. I set up a senior project with that teacher in the form of a seminar about what neuroscience and philosophy of mind, and now in my junior year of college I can say that my fascination with the brain has only grown since. What I learned that year was that neuroscience has infinite applicability. That is, the study of the brain is relevant to literally anything that involves people, and this because everything we do and think depends on that blob of finely folded tissue that resides in our skulls. Neuroscience has something to say about sex, drugs, and rock and rolland thats just the beginning. Kids that love sports are likely to find information about how the brain controls and interfaces with the body interesting. Those who like their foreign language classes might be captivated by the neuroscience of human language. Id also wager that many kids would be interested in learning about their own development and what they can do to get the most out of their brains. This discussion gets into nutrition and the brain, which of course can naturally connect to the sense of taste and how food stimuli are transduced into sensations by our brains. The point here is that given the central roles the brain plays in our lives, it isnt hard to connect kids interests to topics in neuroscience. This, I think, is the key to successful science teaching: instructors have to make science immediately relevant to their students lives.
Despite the potential the neuroscience holds to serve as a powerful tool for introducing young people to scientific principles and for generating interest in careers in science, it typically isnt taught before college. This needs to change. The traditional justification for delaying its presentation is that students should have a solid foundation in the more fundamental natural sciencesphysics, chemistry and biologybefore they begin to study the brain because a sophisticated understanding of its function (and dysfunction) draws from all of these disciplines. This is true, but for just that: a sophisticated understanding. The purpose of introducing neuroscience at the middle and high school levels (and perhaps earlier still) is not to confer a detailed understanding of brain. This should be reserved for university level coursework. Instead, the end of these neuroscience lessons is simply to demonstrate to children that science need not be so abstract and detached from their own experience that it becomes boring and onerous.
Note that I am not suggesting that neuroscience topics should supplant traditional physics, chemistry and biology classes. However, they should inform and enrich these subjects. Physics could be brought to life by considering reaction times and the speed of nerve conduction in addition to the tired old problems about trains careening toward one another. Neurotransmitters activities could be discussed alongside the traditional treatment of acid-base chemistry, and biology, of course, is the easiest of these canonical subjects when it comes to integrating exciting information about the brain with core coursework. I believe that by applying abstract principles from more basic natural sciences to concrete situations in neuroscience and behavior, science teachers around the country could humanize science and dissolve aversions and anxieties students associate with the subject.
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