The screen lights up with a blissfully happy face of a three-year old girl who has just managed to build a molecule model from colored sticks. British scientist Harold Walter Kroto and his two colleagues received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of this molecule. In a sense, Sir Harold (who was knighted in 1996 for his achievements in science) and the little Dutch girl have accomplished the same thing: they have made a discovery while really enjoying the process.
By Mikhail Baklanov
Sir Harold believes that this should be the essence of education, or the ideal that university professors should be striving for. He talked about this in his lecture, "Educational Revolution and the Goo-You-Wiki World", which he presented to students and professors of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech).
Nobel Prize winner Sir Harold Kroto giving a lecture at Skoltech about the challenges of contemporary education. Photo by Sk.ru
The world is going through a triple-revolution called Goo-You-Wiki, which has had an enormous effect on the entire process of education. In the opinion of the prominent researcher, Google, YouTube and Wikipedia have transformed the world and changed the process of acquiring new knowledge beyond all recognition, with Wikipedia playing the most prominent role in bringing about this tremendous change. "Think about it: half a million people are sharing their knowledge voluntarily and completely free of charge, after they have spent an entire lifetime acquiring it." For students and scientists alike, the opportunity to access this source of human knowledge can hardly be overestimated, says Harold Kroto, who obviously does not share the pessimism regarding Wikipedia that may other prominent figures in science have expressed. "In my industry, Wikipedia is the most important invention since the printing press for training future chemists," he was quoted saying.
However, Wikipedia also poses a serious risk to the education process. Sir Harold gave an example to illustrate what he meant. He showed a slide with a primitive toy car put together using a simple metal assembly kit. These are the kind of toys that the Nobel Prize laureate played with as a child. By assembling a toy car from pieces, he learned how it worked. "When I was a child, the most technologically advanced item in our home was a tube radio set," he reminisces. "Whenever a tube blew, the set would go silent, but I understood the link between the former and the latter, while contemporary children have no idea how a cell phone works, and the saddest thing is that they don’t even care. You could fix a tube radio set, but nobody in their right mind would ever think about fixing a mobile phone on their own these days. If it breaks, it is easier to toss it away and get a new one."
People now have the same attitude to the learning process. Why even bother learning if you can find an answer to practically any question on Wikipedia? This is a serious problem, the Nobel Laureate believes.
On the other hand, there is nothing really new about this dilemma. Pablo Picasso once said, "Bad artists copy, great artists steal." What is the Internet’s greatest achievement? It has created an environment that makes following Picasso’s implicit advice on how to achieve greatness really easy to follow.
However, education is not mere data accumulation (in this respect Harold Kroto shares the opinion expressed by Skoltech Dean Natalia Berloff in an interview to sk.ru). Education is about fostering a creative mind. Incidentally, Harold Kroto admitted that as a child he did not dream of becoming a chemist; he wanted to be the Superman. There was laughter in the audience when Sir Harold shared this little childhood secret, seeing as he did not quite have a superhero's build.
According to the great chemist, a sense of humor is one of the three elements of his scientific credo. The other two are Amnesty International and atheism.
Scientists don’t believe, they check
As a profession, science is shrouded in a multitude of myths. When people look at the portrait of Einstein in his late years, they admire his wisdom. But what they do not know is that it was not this old man who created the theory of relativity. Einstein was just 17 years old when he made his greatest contribution to science and humanity, and Darwin had made all of his most important discoveries by the time he was 24.
"There is this widely accepted misconception that common sense never contradicts scientific knowledge. However, 95% of humanity would look at the sky and their common sense would lead them to conclude that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, by contrast, deliberately ignored their common sense, for which they paid dearly. But do you know what the difference is between Giordano Bruno and modern-day martyrs? Today thousands of people are willing to die and are dying for a dogma. Bruno gave up his life for a scientifically established fact. Looking at modern fanatics, you can’t help being amazed by the level of lunacy that still exists in humanity in the XXI century."
Why does this happen? Because people no longer demand proof to confirm various theories. However, a long time ago, the famous Argentine writer and thinker Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia," – "Doubt is one of the names of intelligence." Or, in the words of Harold Kroto, "Scientists don’t believe, they check."
The best way to impart the scientific method to your students is through close interaction with them. This cannot be achieved in an online setting. A qualitative leap is only achieved when new technologies supplement, rather than supplant, traditional teaching methods. One such new approach to education is the creation of a digital archive of video-recorded talks by prominent scientists, something that GEOSET, the Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology, is doing at the moment. The idea of the initiative is very simple: to allow instructors all over the world to borrow ideas from the best professors when explaining various topics. And who can condemn this as "plagiarism"? At the end of the day, it is just a way to create a global pool of knowledge. And in this respect, new technologies offer new opportunities, the value of which can hardly be overestimated.
The Nobel Prize laureate ended his lecture with a story mentioned at the beginning of this article. Harold Kroto talked about an experiment that he and his colleagues recently staged in the Dutch town of Delft. ("I could never figure out what the proper name of that country was. Now, during the FIFA World Cup, I finally got it: when they lose, you call them Holland, and when they win, you call them the Netherlands.") A number of tables were placed in the town’s central square on a weekend, each table supporting a model of the molecule that earned Harold Kroto his Nobel Prize. Children of different ages were invited to take the models apart and put them back together. The second part of the assignment was a challenge for most, but a three-year old girl was the first to complete the task.
What does this tell us about the learning process?