You go talk to kindergartners or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. They ask deep questions. They ask, "What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?"
These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them.
You go talk to 12th graders and there's none of that. They've become incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade. ~Carl Sagan
I agree with the overall point and love Sagan, but this is silly.
When you're 18, you know a lot more and are only interested in what is pertinent to your life going forward. Why are (and this may be what Sagan is talking about here, but maybe not) 150 seniors taking calculus when only 2-3 are going to be using it in their everyday lives?
Questions like "why is the sky blue?" may stump many 12 graders, but it's because the answer isn't a simple one (or more precisely it isn't about the ocean) and the real reason is nerdy to explain.
Why can't 12-graders find x-country on a map? Because it isn't pertinent to their lives.
Learning dates about wars or ratifications or declarations just get jumbled up in their heads after learning it for a test (ST-memory) vs learning to know it (LT-memory).
Standardized testing has retarded the education system.
Multiple-choice testing has retarded our students.
.
Everyone is for education, but no one is willing to do something major for the students. And now it's just caveman politics with one side wanting everyone to have equity and the other side wanting segregation.
It's all broken.
