Science is an Art: A Look at High School Education

Throughout my high school career, I have been puzzled by the seemingly clear and concrete line readily drawn by staff and students alike between the arts and the sciences. The former supposedly requires a highly creative approach to problem solving, while the latter is merely an exercise in logic requiring a strictly computational approach.

This would certainly seem true to any student moving through the high school curriculum with no outside interest in either subject. However, to those who have explored either (and especially to those who have explored both), this distinction is revealed to be an illusion – the product of an out-dated school system desperately in need of repair.

High school arts seem to have progressed over the past few decades: social science courses address current world issues, and art students create contemporary works of dance, drama, film, music, and visual art. Unfortunately, science and mathematics lag behind, stuck in the age of rote memorization of disjoint topics.

Science is not its hypotheses, experiments, observations, or conclusions. It is a method – an invaluable tool in the human search for knowledge. The purpose of studying science is not only to learn of its results, but also to understand how to employ it when attempting to answer a question, whether a disastrous real-world problem or a mere theoretical curiosity.

Throughout my four years in studying biology, chemistry, and physics, very rarely has this been discussed or explained. Instead, I have memorized biological systems, physics equations, and famous chemical experiments. Labs, which should, in theory, be opportunities to experiment in applying science to the real world, are instead almost exclusively pre-determined matters of execution.

Consider a visual arts education structured in this way. Students would rigorously study pre-existing paintings, but gain no knowledge of how the medium could be used to express their own emotions and ideas. During the few days per year they would be allowed to use pencils and paper, they would be told exactly what and how to draw. The wasted potential of this system is immediately obvious: students have no chance to utilize their creativity.

Many students claim to enjoy, or at least to succeed in, mathematics because “there is only ever one answer” that can be obtained simply by “following steps”. This is not so; like science, art, and music, mathematics is a powerful tool which can lead to beautiful and fascinating results, but it must be wielded by a creative mind.

This misconception is incredibly frustrating not only because it degrades the beauty of mathematics but also because it is consistently reinforced by the high school curriculum. Even in the most challenging courses, tests are composed almost entirely of variations on problems taught by rote in class, containing only one “Thinking” question, which requires use of creative problem solving.

High school Mathematics teaches students that all problems have been solved – that confronting new challenges is simply a matter of recycling previously used solutions. This is not true in science and mathematics any more than it is true in life. The frontiers of mathematics are constantly being pushed by the creation of new approaches to problem solving, resulting in tremendous discovery. As soon as a problem has been solved, it is no longer considered a problem.

As such, the problems which currently face our planet are not simply variations of old ones; we cannot “plug in numbers” to get the answers we are searching for. Solutions will require an unprecedented amount of creative scientific approach. If the school system wishes to train a generation of students prepared to solve the issues facing the 21^st century, perhaps it is time to bring the science and mathematics curricula into the 21^st century as well.