12 Years Of School, What Did I Get

Only recently have I come to realize it has been twelve years since I walked into my first day of elementary school and started calling myself a ‘student’. Now that I have an entire summer to reflect upon this twelve-year experience, I thought it a good idea to look into what I got after twelve years of schooling.

Simply put, I got a LOT of lore. Well, this comes as no surprise to me, merely out of the fact that I’ve been brought up intellectually in the Chinese education system, one that has been widely criticized for its lore-oriented manner. Ever since the 1^st grade, I have been subjected to hours of lecturing on lore, learning ancient poems by rote instead of understanding and appreciating its inner beauty, memorizing theorems and principles in science without seeing the actual experimental data and working them out myself, and much more. The most pathetic part is that I get to ultimately spend two whole years, 9^th and 12^th grade, going over all the lore to prepare for two exams. It reminds me of what Richard Feynman wrote of in his Joking: “I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.”

And about this whole lore business, though Dr. Feynman did not use this very word in Joking, he nevertheless meant it: “I can show you what's the matter--how it's not science, but memorizing, in every circumstance…… And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven't told anything about nature.” He also stated that there is a difference between knowing the name of something and truly knowing something. Back to our education system, I think it is fair to say that all we’ve got is lore, or most of what we’ve got is lore. Let me take our high school science curriculum for an example (it wouldn’t have mattered if I had taken Chinese or math or anything else—it’s practically the same). Flipping through the pages of my physics, chemistry, and biology textbooks or notes, I see no experimental data and of course no analysis that arise from them. Instead I see explanations and conclusions all over the place—the exact problem Dr. Feynman pointed out. We have been told the names of a whole lot of things—chemical equilibrium, relativity, evolution, and etc. But do we really understand them? Can we ourselves see from experimental evidence or observation that it has to be so? No, well at least I can’t.

So, evidently all the lore we got doesn’t really mean much. Now, what do we need to get? I recall a lecturer from the New Oriental School, Du Changxu, once saying (he was an electronic engineer by training and actually runs a company, lecturing at NOS is only a personal hobby) “I don’t know how to write Java programs, simply because I haven’t learned it. But I’ve learned how to learn it. If I were to be given a project that requires Java, I could nail it in a week. That’s what matters.” So, learning how to learn the lore is the essential of learning. I have to admit that I’ve been on the wrong track for some time. In 12^th grade, I repulsed having to waste a whole year going over what I’ve learned earlier so I started on some college curriculum, or what I thought was college curriculum. I read intensively every book I could find in my school library about biology—biochemistry, molecular biology, cellular biology, physiology, neurobiology, immunology, and took lots of study notes. My rigorous campaign came to an end when I recently realized these are still lore—I do not really understand them, still not deriving the statements from experimental data or observation. What I need is not lore, but the ability to understand the lore if I needed them.

What else should we get? Ability. And I’m not talking about the ability to solve some fancy math problem in the Gaokao, or the ability to use VSEPR to deduce a molecular structure, or the ability to calculate the probabilities of a couple giving birth to a boy with anemia but not hemophilia. It’s the ability to solve real-life problems, through creativity and critical thinking. Sadly, years of lore-oriented education has not helped us. And I sincerely hope that’s what we’re going to get in college, scientific training, thought-provoking lectures—in short, the real deal.

But above all, we need scientific integrity, whether we’re getting trained as scientists or not. Again, from Richard Feynman, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself —and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.” While presenting our ideas, we need to be honest and show every argument in favor and not in favor of our thesis. This is the right way to do it, so other people could decide on a non-biased base whether or not our ideas are reasonable. But we see deceits flying directly in the face of such principles every day—turn on your TV or open a browser page and it’s filled with unilateral statements, whether it is about the Iran nuclear issue, domestic corruption, or just hair-regenerating shampoo. In short, they don’t give you the full picture, the very thing that objective judgment relies on.

Also, scientific integrity requires saying no to authorities, academic or political. In this perspective, Clair Patterson of Caltech is one noted and respectable character, of course for his dedication and contribution to the dating of Earth, but more to his life-long struggle against industrial addition of lead in petroleum. As observed in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, “He now made it his life’s quest to get lead taken out of gasoline. To that end, he became a constant and often vocal critic of the lead industry and its interests……Patterson suddenly found research funding withdrawn or difficult to acquire. The school trustees were repeatedly pressed by lead industry officials to shut him up or let him go…… To his great credit, Patterson never wavered or buckled. Eventually his efforts led to the introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and finally to the removal from sale of all leaded gasoline in the United States in 1986……But never did he gain any fame or even much attention from half a century of consistent and increasingly selfless achievement.” Now, this is a real scientist. I personally couldn’t think of anything more to comment, for it’s all self-evident, isn’t it?

So, in retrospect I didn’t get much out of elementary, middle, and high school, but luckily this merciless fact struck me now, albeit belated, giving me the opportunity to move on and really get to know something in college and beyond.