Sky & Telescope October 2002 [antikvár]

JIBack to SchoolIt's that time of year when students will (we hope) put down their videogame controllers, pick up their pencils (or laptop computers!), and return to classrooms ready to learn. Teachers will return to those same classrooms ready to teach. But what should they teach? What should students learn?Here in the U.S., we emphasize the three r's: reading 'riting, and 'rithmetic. Throughout elementary and secondary school, and often well into college, we require students to study literature, language, history, and mathematics yearafter year. But there's a fourth r, one that's just as important as the other three: reasoning. This skill is taught (and, we hope, learned) in all the required subjects, but it is emphasized most in science classes.Unfortunately, in the U.S. we don't require most students to take much science. In our universities, students not preparing for a technical career need enroll in only a single one-semester science course. For some 200,000 such students ^ annually, that course is introductory astronomy.For the past couple of years the question of what to teach in "Astronomy 101" has been the subject of raucous debate among astro educators. Some argue that instructors should move quickly beyond the basics, such as lunar phases and the cause of the seasons, to more advanced and exciting topics, such as stellar evolution, galactic structure, and cosmology. Others argue that even at the college level most students have very little scientific understanding, so teachers should concentrate on fundamentals such as the inverse-square law, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the scientific method. Proponents of these views have been squaring off at American Astronomical Society meetings, on the pages of the trade journal The Physics Teacher, and in the Astronomy Education Review (http://aer.noao.edu/).In an ideal world, instructors would strike a balance between the two approaches. Astronomy 101 presents a terrific opportunity to inspire young people to look up at the night sky and to take an interest in (and support funding for) contemporary astronomical research. At the same time it affords one last chance to teach our newest citizens, workers, and voters how to approach the world with a scientist's skepticism and to think critically about issues involving insufficient or conflicting evidence, unclear causes and effects, and other uncertainties.It s hard to find an appropriate balance, though, when you have hterally the whole universe to cover and only one lousy semester in which to do it. So which way should Astronomy 101 teachers lean? To me, science is less a body of knowledge than it is a way of knowing. So if the choice is another lecture on the latest astronomical discoveries or another exercise that helps students learn to use their brains, I'd vote for the latter the fourth r.