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Timothy Johnson's avatar

When Egan said any subject could be taught to any child at any stage of development, how young do you think he meant?

My oldest son is not quite two, and he loves to walk past our local elementary school and see their painting of the solar system along the wall. I'm happy to name all the planets for him, but I'm not sure how much that actually teaches him.

For now, my main strategy is to focus on things he sees in the real world. For example, he recently realized that he has a shadow. So I'll point out that his shadow points in different directions or gets longer or shorter at different times of day.

Noticing things about the world and asking why seems to me like the beginning of science, even if he's still too young to understand the explanation.

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Leah Libresco Sargeant's avatar

" A lot of this sounds very avant-garde, but I worry that it would really confuse kids, especially young ones.

You know who else was confused? Aristotle. Ptolemy. Copernicus. Galileo. Even Newton.²³ When it comes to the big picture of the Universe, if you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention."

The other big benefit to comfort with confusion is that it shows children that confusion is a natural part of the learning process, and not a signpost that says "STOP, wait for the teacher."

When confusion is part of the storytelling of science, and we're honest a lot of our theories *conflict* with day to day experience and require something beyond what you passively observe, we're representing the call to adventure of science well.

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