Science education as fairy tale, as adventure, and as myth-a new approach to igniting a passion for science in kindergarten children
A movement is swelling in America today to entice children to take up science, to spark a curiosity, exploration, and, it is hoped, a love for science in children at the very earliest age possible. Proponents of this movement say we can start children on this path when they are in kindergarten. Those who have looked into this possibility state that by the time a child enters kindergarten, the child already possesses a level of language sophistication that enables them to approach scientific knowledge, albeit at an extremely basic level, and that it is entirely feasible to begin science education in kindergarten. Children have powerful language learning ability at kindergarten age, and science, as all intellectual disciplines, is also language. Because kindergarten is an immersion in language (what is kindergarten if not the alphabet, words, stories, instructions in play, to name a few language dependent activities?), kindergarten is already structured to accommodate science education. The problem will be to present science in a way that does not confuse, that is not overly technical, and that enchants the child as do those stories about magicians, fairies, and goblins. What is needed, then, is a new genera of story telling that contains all the mystery and drama of fairy tales, adventures, and myths, but that are, simultaneously, science education.
Creative writers are being called to weave children stories that replace the magician of those older tales with a wizard who, equipped with science, emerges in a fable as the hero of the tale. Instead of knights fighting off enemies and dragons with the tools of war, the new knight will fight with the gadgets and tools of science. A microscope will replace the crystal ball. Observation, even if by birds, will be the secret means for overcoming those goblins and demons that we older ones will recognize as disease, the injustices of society, humanity's natural antagonists. Even those ageless poems we teach our little ones can be recast to teach some principle established in science. That ageless poem about a couple of children climbing a hill with a pail of water and falling down can be used to teach the law of gravity. Children stories that teach true science, rather than superstition, will now be in demand. While we will still retain those stories that teach morals, increasingly, we will replace the irrational with the rationality of science, or at least mix the two.
Writers of children stories have been given a new mandate through this movement, to create stories that connect the impressionable minds of children to the ruler of our era, to science and the body of knowledge that has resulted from about three hundred years of serious, strict, valid, scientific research. While we may still present science to kindergarten students in the old, prosaic way we have done for all these years, although we may astound them with awesome demonstrations and give them projects that allow them to explore and discover scientific truths on their own, we will now also give children a more palatable serving of science. Children take medicines, vitamins, other distasteful things if we sugar coat these. Although not distasteful, more often bland, science will become a marvelous thing in the eyes of children. Though they may see these fictions as entertainment, in fact, these stories will be science education with a sugar coat. We're calling on all writers of children's stories to be proponents of science education too. It's the new market and there's room for you.