Sometimes as a blogger you come across a story that you know must be written about but you don’t know exactly what to say - it’s a story that makes you laugh but also makes you cringe. The excerpt I am posting below is from such a story (this one comes from the LA Times) :

“the results of an international test released last week that show American 15-year-olds don’t know much about science and are falling behind their peers in other industrialized nations. But why get depressed?

There is an aluminum foil lining: The test also found that our teens don’t let their ignorance bother them. They may not know as much as students in Finland, Canada or New Zealand, but they think they do. When asked to rate their own scientific abilities, they put themselves at the top with their better-educated peers.”

What to do with this!? I have always been one to believe that test scores aren’t the best way to measure how one is doing in terms of their education, but I also don’t think it’s good that we have kids running around thinking that they’re as smart as kids around the globe who have proven they know more - it seems a tad arrogant to me.

I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

For example, in my 11th grade chemistry class I was notorious for the smoke that would appear around my lab table when we did experiments - the smoke was almost always a signal that I had done something wrong. But I didn’t delude myself into thinking that it didn’t mean anything, that I was just as chemistry proficient as my friends in the class that always had perfect lab results.

I did know, however, that while they were probably smarter (or at least read the text book more often) than me when it came to scientific equations, it was OK, because I excelled in other areas. The masters of the Bunsen burners would most likely have trouble if they came to the weekly debate tournaments with me to discuss the moral ramifications of whether economic sanctions were justified. This didn’t make my science friendly pals any smarter than me, or me any smarter than them - it just meant that different kids have different strengths.

The answer to the problem the LA Times presents isn’t to make those science deficient kids feel like they’re as good in science as everyone else, but to help them find something they are really good at.

Well, that’s what I think anyways - what do you think? Leave us a comment, join the debate!