I have had the opportunity to teach science and give critical thinking programs to kids of just about every age. I faced one of my greatest challenges last week when I did my first program in a series of three for my son’s preschool. I did two short classes for the groups of three and four year-olds on colors and optical illusions. It was a blast and the kids seemed engaged. We mixed colors with food dye, we separated colors with paper chromatography, and the kids showed up their teacher with the color/word confusion chart (a sure thing with kids who know their colors but can’t read). In the end, I asked the little ones if they had fun, they enthusiastically cheered “YES!”. I then asked them what they learned. A girl shouted “colors are made of science” - another cheer rose up.
At first, I felt a little dejected. They hadn’t learned anything. I quickly got over that when I remembered they are only three and four. I also had to reminded myself that there are two parts to this. Sometimes we get too lost in our focus on science literacy. Don’t get me wrong, science literacy is vital and in a tragic state. We also have to tackle the other end of the equation, which is science appreciation. An encyclopedic understanding of the periodic table seems so much less important when not accompanied by an appreciation for the powerful scientific methods that produced it. I don’t mean zany “science is cool” programs but exercises that show that science really works and that it’s not just for scientists.
Preschoolers may have difficulty grasping even the simplest elements of science as a body of knowledge, they are primed, however, to understand it as a process. This was obvious in how interested the kids were in finding out how all the experiments work. I spend a great deal of time with my son and am often amazed at Atom’s natural inclination to look for the mechanisms behind the things he sees around him. We see this even in babies who learn their world through experimentally testing “what’s happens when I do this” by dumping milk from the highchair or pulling a dog’s tail repeatedly.
This is what makes young children such great skeptics. Sure, we all know that evolution has led us to be much more likely to believe in angels than become members of the JREF, but we can do a lot to promote some of the other tendencies that are also hardwired into children. I find (admittedly anecdotal) that although children have a much richer fantasy life than adults, they also seem better equipped to separate it from reality. My son is obsessed with all things relating to aliens and Yeti’s (mostly thanks to Daniel Loxton), but he talks about them as things that are fun parts of stories, cartoons and comics. He has never made a connection to them as real things that interact with real people. Its not that he is convinced they don’t exist, he just doesn’t assume that everything in his cartoons are part of the real world. A little evidence would likely change that. I also find that when he does come across things he doesn’t understand, his explanations are often quite reasonable (in the context of his limited experience). Recently, when he thought he heard a voice in the night, we talked about it. The idea of a ghost seemed ridiculous to him. He tried to think of things that he knew existed that sound like human voices and concluded it was likely a parrot or a robot. Not likely, but I felt really good that he made a list of possible and plausible explanations for the voice and wasn’t afraid to say he didn’t really know.
I think its important that we promote this naturally occurring skeptical toolset in children and bolster its foundation whenever possible. We know that with time it will be bombarded with the accumulating biases, misleading patterns, socialized superstitions, and confusing randomness that cloud our thinking throughout life. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for robots and parrots.