| I think more needs to be done to understand why some really hard things to do -- like hitting a baseball, shooting 3 pointers, etc. -- are not considered elitist, and have literally millions of children spending many hours practicing them. (And note that it is hard to find complaints about the "unfairness" of sports teams trying to find and hire the very best players.) And, in the end, very few get really good (I think I saw somewhere that there are only about 70,000 professional athletes in the US -- vs e.g. about 900,000 PhDs in the sciences, math, engineering and medicine.) Two ideas about this are that (a) these are activities in which the basic act can be seen clearly from the first, and (b) are already part of the larger culture. There are levels that can be seen to be inclusive starting with modest skills (cooking is another such). Music is interesting to look at. If the music is simple, we find the singing of songs with lyrics vastly more popular than instrumentals on the pop charts. But we also find "guitar gods" at the next and still high level of popularity. As the music gets more complex and requires more learning to be able to hear what is going on, the popularity drops off (and this has happened in many pop genres over the last 100 years or so). A lot of pop culture (I think) comes from teenagers wanting their place in the sun, and quickly. Finding a genre that's doable and can be a proclamation of identity -- akin to trying to be distinctive with clothing or hair cuts -- can be much easier than tackling a developed skill. I think a very large problem for the learning of both science and math is just how invisible are their processes, especially in schools. The wonderful PSSC physics curriculum from the 50s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Science_Study_Committ...) bridged that gap with many short films showing scientists doing their thing on topics and using methods that were completely understandable right from the first minutes. This made quite a difference to many high school students. I think I said somewhere in the blather of the interview that the easiest way to deal with the problems of teaching reading is to revert back to an oral society, especially if schools increasingly give in to what students expect from their weak uses of media. A talk I gave some years ago showed an alternating title line: between "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and "The easiest way to predict the future is to prevent it". The latter is more and more popular these days. |