My parents were both elementary school teachers. I was born in 1969.
My dad had a 40-year career teaching science to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. Think model rockets, aquariums, microscopes, chemistry sets, rock collections, and all the wide-eyed kids being exposed to that (myself included).
We'd play a card game called Space Race, and I had a really cool model of the spaceship from Space: 1999. It was all quite wonderful. My dad would bring home copies of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics from the school library at lunch (yes, we walked/rode our bikes to and from school and went home for lunch back then).
The chemistry sets were insanely cool and dangerous at the same time, and my dad would bring home vials of poorly-labeled powders for me to experiment with. I made gunpowder. I blew fuses in the basement by shorting a cobalt chloride-soaked cork in an electrical outlet (I don't know why I did that). Phenolphthalein came with my kit, as did an alcohol burner. At least half the stuff was carcinogenic. Needless to say, gloves and safety glasses were not in use in the basement :)
I was exposed to that at home, and I wanted nothing more than to be a chemistry professor from a very young age when I learned about the degrees and higher education.
So I earned an M.A. in geology and a Ph.D. in chemistry and was briefly a professor. The research years in academia leading up to that point were certainly the highlight of my working years. I published. I worked for and with brilliant people. I played with high explosives (Master's work) like HMX, RDX, and TNT. I had access to great facilities and instrumentation. I worked on a Cray Y-MP and every system that came along.
Anyway, just a walk down memory lane and a nod to the title of the post/article. I certainly had a predilection for science, but being thrown into it certainly pushed me in that direction.
I'm trying to get back into my chosen field, specifically in computational chemistry and drug design. It's rough sledding as they say, since I am an older candidate who is hardly up to speed on where things are now vs. circa 2005.
For the past 18 years - since I left academia - I've been bouncing around as a "data scientist," working in many fields but not what I really want to do and/or am actually good at doing.
In my experience it's almost always the case with industry that you end up in some adjacent niche that isn't quite exactly what you want to do, even if you never leave the field of your schooling. By that I mean it may be a lot easier to get into computational chemistry for something other than drug design.
It's a weird time now with software eating everything and many science jobs asking for PhD in <our science branch> or Computer Science (!) as requirements. So I'd assume there's some angle in which your experience provides an advantage.
@JamesianP - You're exactly right about the heady requirement lift. And there are plenty of widely-defined computational chemistry jobs, especially when you throw in the bio- prefix.
As for the adjacent niche bit, right again as you are about experience. My time as a so-called "data scientist" was never really the best fit, and I could never compete with the folks who do Kaggle competitions and have a real passion for AI/ML (which, to me, is one of the defining points of "data science" today).
However, I've logged a lot of time over the past 30+ years in front of the terminal, so fingers crossed!
@deskamess - I believe a Master's is the minimum buy-in, and Ph.D. is preferred. My Ph.D. area is quite narrowly in theoretical chemical physics, but was all heavy computation and focused on quantum and classical dynamics.
The areas of study are going to be computational chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, cheminformatics, or something closely related to those. Whether you work in a lab or in front of a computer depends on what you study and whose lab you study it in. You can't go wrong with a Ph.D. from UCSF, I can tell you that (I was a postdoc there), so browse the faculty pages.
Have a look at some of the open positions at, say, Roche/Genentech. There are some great open source resources and some industry-dominant ones with which you'll be expected to have some experience in (Schrodinger's software is one of them). Domain knowledge, of course. QSAR/ADME and similar acronyms. Docking, free energy perturbation, bioinformatics. Python/R/SQL.
AI/ML is of course hot in pharma but not necessarily useful for all situations - I happen to not be much of an AI/ML guy and won't be penalized for that, which I cannot say about almost every job I've had or applied for.
What got my foot in the door with drug design was postdoctoral work on molecular dynamics simulations of large systems that are physiologically relevant - motor proteins - and I was teamed-up with experimentalists who were studying the same systems.
More than happy to share more, my contact info is in my profile.
Thank you for the detailed response and your offer to share more. Let me start with the resources you have already shared so I have a decent background before I come back with questions.
Wish you success in your efforts to get back into the industry.
> As many other studies have shown, when children hear descriptions of categories, whether “apples are red” or “scientists are smart,” they infer that members of those categories have special, exclusive characteristics.
My friend in college had a mannerism that when he was about to give up on understanding something he was saying "it's for smart people to figure out". It always elicited visceral reaction from me "No, eff that. We are the smart people. We can figure this out."
This is so common in the current anti-intellectual American mindset... other forms it takes:
- I wouldn't know, X person is way smarter than me
- (Try to discuss how something might work...) This was made by really smart people, I'll leave it to them!
- (learns you're doing an Engineering degree) Wow, you must be really smart!
- The "for science!!" trope
That sounds more like “avoidance of personal engagement in intellectual pursuit” rather than anti-intellectual - if anything these suggest complete deference to supposed experts.
I remember being interested in sciences as a kid, but every time I asked for a chemistry kit or anything practical, I just got books and documentaries. Don't be those parents.
> but every time I asked for a chemistry kit or anything practical, I just got books and documentaries.
In my first day at school and at school library I have asked some books about physics or chemistry. My ask was refused and all books I was allowed to take were fiction books for children.
Different strokes I guess? I was always much more into the books and was put off by having to experiment. (Then I did go on to study theoretical physics ...)
To the people posting about having good chemistry sets as a kid: what were these sets and where did you/your parents get them? Where are the good sources today?
Everything I remember growing up in the 90s was pretty dumbed down at best, and if you wanted to order any of the interesting chemicals or equipment, you needed a company or school letterhead with a PO account. Things got better in the 00s when eBay was still pretty open in terms of what you could find, but that seems to have been clamped down on more recently. Fear of litigation most likely.
I think that 1990 is probably pretty close to the point where chemistry sets finally got safe(r).
I was born in the early 80s and my older brother was born in the mid 70s, and I distinctly remember preferring to play with his old hand-me-down chemistry set rather than mine. One like his could not be found in stores anywhere by the time I was old enough to be interested in a chemistry set.
But I also never gave myself any horrible chemical burns playing with my own chemistry set. So it's probably a decent trade-off, all told.
Ever hear Kary Mullis (PCR inventor / Nobel prize) talk about his childhood? He could basically buy whatever chemical he wanted. Definitely did dangerous stuff and got into trouble, but it’s hard to imagine children today having similar ability to hone skills with brains still spungey and time still abundant.
I believe it. In the 50s You used to be able to get chemistry sets with potassium chlorate and mail-in coupons for radioisotopes. Now it’s all the same cheap, uninspiring crap for making glue slime or vinegar/baking soda fizzes.
I had sympathetic parents with chemistry degrees, and we were able to find ways to get the cool stuff when I was a teenager, but for the vast majority, it’s no surprise that kids lose interest in STEM fields as they reach their teens.
> I had sympathetic parents with chemistry degrees
In other words, you were able to access the cool stuff because someone in your life knew how to handle it. That is probably the way it should be. Now consider all of the families where the parents do not have chemistry degrees, do not work in industries where they regularly handle hazardous materials, or even have to take general workplace safety seriously. You pretty much have to hope the teenager instilled a sense of respect for safety in themselves.
Yea, when I was a teenager I had a key to my high school chemistry lab, and would go do experiments on my liquid mercury resonance reactor in the weekend.
How wild is that?! Can’t imagine it happening today
Well now information is so accessible that with access to those chemicals you would have degenerate kids blowing up schools instead of just shooting them up.
There weren’t exactly mass casualties resulting from the chemistry sets being mentioned by the other posters in this thread either. We just got more afraid of being sued.
Snark aside, where is the middle ground? Fizzing and food coloring is interesting to a 5 year old, but that’s about all you can get as a consumer these days. There’s likely a vast gulf of squandered opportunity between that and what can genuinely be done safely and still be inspiring.
Yeah, a little bit. It’s not just kids that can’t get their hands on stuff. Even trained adults have to jump through regulatory and legal hoops. Schools face tons of liability. Mass market chemistry sets are lame now.
If you want to buy anything from Alfa Aesar, Fisher Scientific or any similar “real” supplier, you need to be a corporation or educational institution and have a purchasing account or p-card. Even if it’s distilled water or sodium chloride. Find a kid who can jump through those hoops and you’ll have someone who’d probably make a decent cofounder
I mean, yes? Our threshold for what's dangerous is very sensitive and our trust in kids is very low.
A ten year old raised to understand danger can be capable of using bleach safely, operating a lawnmower, or carrying out fun exothermic reactions in the backyard.
In the 90's my aunt bought an old chemistry set from a yard sale and it was amazing! From the 60s or 70s I think. Had all kinds of crazy stuff you'd never get (even then) off a big box store shelf.
To these people as well; cooking is chemistry. Making household cleaners is chemistry.
To do chemistry with kids all one needs is a grocery store, an herb shoppe, and the right explanations for what’s going on.
But instead there’s bunch of waxing poetic about how the world has changed. It’s rather pathetic to think science should come neatly labeled in a box. The lack of individual creativity and imagination in our culture is stunning.
As a child, a lot of innovation comes from riffing on things you see/learn from the world around you.
When you talk to people that had scientific experiences as a child, a significant component of the learning comes from tinkering with already built devices, seeing an experiment and thinking "what else would work in this," etc.
Science isn't neatly labeled in a box. However, a decent chunk of it is using previously done research to guide new questions, a process that is emulated on a smaller level by chemistry sets.
What you said isn’t unreasonable but so generic it hardly says “must buy chemistry set”.
“Previously done research” like “these things taste good together” and “add this to cleaner to get a nice smell.” Sounds like riffing on the world right around them. You’re not going to get functionally fixed on when and where to use generic language like “previously done research” are you?
The rigor can come in when the work demands it. Kid’s chemistry sets are not saving lives or unlocking new truths. The industrial pipeline to produce them hardly seems worth it.
You do you. Personally, I prefer the path of least resistance for myself; buying less, dealing with less mess, and using the immediate environment to explore the same language and ideas. Of course it means having an imagination. Something adults often lack, seeing the path of least resistance as living in their memory, behaving literally in lock step with it.
Both of my parents are chemists. My brothers and I never had a chemistry set. There was plenty to learn about chemistry, and science, just doing regular household things, outdoors, etc.
Why would you want to get kids into science? It don’t pay for shit and career/life prospects are grim. Grind out a phd for 80k starting salary? Hard pass
An understanding of and willingness to do science is a broadly applicable skill across many different disciplines (even if you don't get a degree in it), as well as being a useful life skill. It's something kids absolutely should be exposed to even if it's not their passion nor do they wind up doing something as an adult which would be generally labelled 'science' (which is a shorthand usually meaning natural sciences specifically).
As a scientist, I'd say this claim doesn't hold true for many scientific disciplines. I know scientists working in biopharma earning over $1M per year.
That said, I do think the salary mentioned is accurate as a starting salary in academia for a research faculty position (tenure track starting salary in USA is ~50% higher though), but academia pays much worse than industry. You give up salary for huge amounts of autonomy.
There are people earning $200k, $500k, and $1M+ in many fields.
The probability of getting there (and quality of life while getting there and after you get there), are the important bits of information.
For example, if you have to grind out my whole 20s (some of the best years for the human body) doing dissertations and working 80+ hour weeks for near minimum wage (per hour worked), only for a 10% chance to make it to $200k per year or more, maybe it is not worth it.
Especially if other options exist that provide much higher probabilities of attaining an income you want with similar levels of dedication.
Unfortunately, in the USA that's true across PhDs and MDs. It requires about 10-15 years post high school to make more than a living wage.
At least for everyone I know, they all ended up with comfortable salaries after finishing their PhDs. Most people spend our best years spending the majority of our time working, and at least for me, scientific research makes it not feel like work. Not everything is about money and a professor can live well in many places on a $90K salary, speaking from past experience.
The biggest cost is probably the impact it has on trying to have a family since one doesn't typically have much salary or time until around age 35 with the typical trajectory.
While the ROI on MD has gone down quite a bit, it is not as volatile as PhD. The floor for MDs is quite a bit higher, and the path to high income is well defined (less random to achieve it if you go through the steps).
grad school wasn't a grind in my experience. Definitely easier and more fun than a real job, apart from the sparse high-stress deadlines of course. I think that's generally the norm in the US (except in chemistry I hear?)
> You give up salary for huge amounts of autonomy.
The "autonomy" is a facade in many instances. Professors have to do what can be funded. For a lot of professors that means doing what's trendy or what panders to moneyed interests rather than what they'd actually like to do and what would be more valuable.
Read chapter 4, titled "Assignable Curiosity", in the book Disciplined Minds for more detail.
This is true if you need large amounts of resources ($) to achieve your research goals. At least for me, I have not found this to be true.
However, what I was thinking about when I wrote that was that I control my schedule, calendar, research objectives, and have a yearly check in on my performance. In contrast, my experience in industry was VERY different across the board.
> This is true if you need large amounts of resources ($) to achieve your research goals.
My experience is that the quoted situation is the exception in US academia. Despite paying a pittance, graduate students are expensive enough to make professors dependent on the approval of funders. And that's where the loss of autonomy comes from.
It seems to me that certain parts of academia that are more funded by teaching like pure math may be more immune to this, but STEM broadly seems accurately described by the chapter I recommended.
> However, what I was thinking about when I wrote that was that I control my schedule, calendar, research objectives, and have a yearly check in on my performance. In contrast, my experience in industry was VERY different across the board.
I agree with what you said, aside from that I don't think you have full autonomy over your research objectives. If you think you control your own research objectives, I recommend reading the chapter I mentioned. As far as I can tell, your interests are well aligned with what's supported. I looked you up, and was not surprised to see that you work in deep learning, one of the most supported and hyped fields around today. People (like myself) whose interests aren't aligned with what's supported often find academia to be quite hostile. The relative research autonomy you feel is real, but if you decide to move outside of deep learning, you may no longer find the same sense of research autonomy.
> “You give up salary for huge amounts of autonomy.”
I heard otherwise from a staff scientist at a university in biological sciences, though I’m not sure how representative his view is. He said that non-professors lack research autonomy, and even then, there are limitations of what one can fund due to grants (though I’m not sure how accurate this is, as I used to assume that academic grants generally had fairly flexible conditions for using the funding).
This is all accurate. There is flexibility in funding, but if you use your grant money for a completely different project than you proposed, you better hit an absolute home run or you won't get any more grants.
You also have to factor in how terrible post-doc pay and job security is, just to have a shot at getting on the tenure track. In the US it's half of that 80k number in bio research.
We also need to dispel the myth that tenure track academic roles are the only jobs for scientists. In my field, one can have a wonderful, decently-paying career working in some of the most desirable places in the US if they go the national lab route. There's also a thriving private sector which will just get bigger. This doesn't even factor in the exit ramp careers if, late in the game, a student realizes that "science" isn't quite what they want to do for their 9-5 - e.g., trading in all of those hundreds or thousands of hours grinding data analyses for their Masters/PhD for a career in data science or software engineering.
We should make sure that folks understand a modern career in science may look, from a salary and QoL perspective, quite like a doctor or other professional. High-stress, relatively low-pay, challenging from your late teens to late twenties, then a rapid increase in earning power and opportunity into your early thirties.
I completely agree, but I think most people who arrive at this perspective only reach this view after spending time in industry or adjacent to people working there.
A lot of the focus on tenure track jobs comes from professors and academics who dedicate their life almost solely in academic environments (so in their view, it’s a rather unhealthy attitude of academic tenure or bust). I’m not sure how feasible this is, but perhaps a work-study private sector summer internship could be an encouraged part of certain PhD, to widen perspectives and help both students and professors better understand the possibilities out there, which someone can be motivated to strive for, rather than settle for.
Absolutely. There have always been domains where industry roles have been just as sought after as academic ones - think Computer Science broadly, and all the opportunities one has with a PhD there. Other domains have been slow to catch on to this, but it seems like there has been an inflection point over the past 10 years where we're just so grossly overproducing PhDs in so many domains relative to academic jobs that there is mounting pressure on degree programs to revamp their training/prep for "alternative" career paths.
Myself and colleagues are definitely trying to encourage our alma mater to have more support for externships other opportunities in industry. I think things will continue to change - for the better, for early career scientists - over the next 5-10 years. If only because there is a workforce crisis in my field where skills like AI and software engineering are in extremely high demand, but even 3-4 years ago we actively discouraged PhD students from pursuing this type of work!
In my time as a PhD student (granted still there currently just at the finishing things up stage) I was actually part of founding an organization for students to basically do this. We invited speakers from different fields and had them talk about "alternative" career paths considering the current system basically assumes you want to become a professor. We also included a workshop every year where we would build in career skills and have professionals come and speak. You learn very quickly that there is an incredible range of activities one can do with a PhD.
Not all people have the motivation and self discipline to force themselves through a career in something that they hate, solely for the money.
I learned programming as a kid in 1981 and fell in love with it. I knew about the demand for programmers, as my mom was teaching programming at a nearby tech school.
My college internship was at a large computing facility, which employed a number of programmers. I formed the impression that programming as a job was incredibly repetitive, stressful, and boring. I majored in math and physics, and ended up with a PhD in physics.
I do plenty of programming today, but on my own terms. I work at a place that has a large programming department, and my opinion of programming as a job has not changed. On the other hand, if someone loves that kind of work, or can at least grind their way through it, they're welcome to the money.
It may have taken me a bit longer to reach a decent salary level. Today, I'm the highest ranking "technical track" worker in one division of a F500. Had I gone into programming, I might have reached a plateau, or burnt out.
My family made noticeably less than that, even considering inflation since then. In my home town the average family income is around half that in today’s dollars. I’m a high income SWE now. Growing up in a <$75k HH income family doesn’t imply grim prospects, that’s typical middle class. Everyone I grew up with would consider $75k high income bordering on rich.
They won’t be Able to make it to a career in science. Since you need a PHD or at least a masters to do it you need to go through some top tier universities and invest some serious $$ into it. Science is for love is only a marginally better career choice than art.
Because it gives them tools to understand the world. Because not everything you teach kids has to lead to a PhD or a specific career? Because 'science' plays into engineering, finance and tech sector careers?
To me, getting kids into science is not just a path to PhDs, but to engineering and technology in general, and that is a very lucrative area money wise.
STEM is pushed hard, but realistically, science and math dont have that great career prospects. For one thing, a PhD, and the 4-7 year opportunity cost that comes with it, is pretty much required to get anything more than a lab tech job.
After that PhD, where do you go? You can try for an insanely competitive tenure track faculty position. Or a very limited number of industry researcher jobs.
The E in STEM (traditional engineering) isn't exactly tech in terms of salaries and job availability, but it mostly guarantees paying the bills with a decent WLB after "just" a bachelor's.
A PhD in maths is _incredibly_ valuable. Anything abstract algebra related, and the likes of the NSA are all over you. Anything numerical analysis related will find plenty of opportunities in finance, and the industry just calls statistics specialists "Data Scientists".
The NSA doesn't pay that much compared to the opportunity cost of the wage lost getting that PhD. Their salaries are capped by government standards, they can't pay above that.
I heard that if you studied math with applications to computer science, you can find great opportunities with technology too (if not moving to the US for places like Google, there are quantum computing startups like Xanadu in Canada, along with other technology startups in Canada’s big cities too).
In addition, outside of the RCMP, various ministries of the Canadian government could need the skillset too (Statistics Canada being the one that first comes to mind, though any teams that do economic analyses could benefit from someone with the background).
There are a fair number of phd’s employed in biotech/pharma. Who do you think makes the stuff? Bs/ms are their techs. The ads in the states publishes salary history every year for those who care. It’s not SV salary but it’s way more useful than selling ads and scarfing data - you can actually end up curing a cancer or other diseases…
And before you go about just curing symptoms, remember that many real cures would require gene modification and people aren’t all that interested in being a gmo. Ask RA sufferers about drugs like Humera re curing symptoms.
I mean, usually you just end up trading stonk at Renaissance Technologies or PanAgora. I'm not studying anything finance related and haven't even finished my phd and they've still been actively after me to sell my soul for mid six figures. The worst part was, I did the interviews to get an offer and everyone I talked to was tangibly brilliant- like could really be changing the world instead of this. I almost did it for the money + chance to work with a bunch of actually smart people, but the moral implications barely won out.
I came to the conclusion that most likely, taking the job was morally neutral- barely hurting nor helping anyone outside the firm (not specifically RT- don't want to out myself); but that on a larger scale our country is rotting because our most capable thinkers are doing this instead of anything morally positive (solving healthcare, solving the climate crisis, leading the country), and I didn't want to participate in that brain drain.
Looking at my own motivations, one of the big draws of the position was that everyone I talked to at the firm was competent and pleasant, while in domains solving real problems (again for example healthcare and climate) 70% of people I've interacted with are stupid, petty, or both. But stepping back, isn't that state of affairs existentially horrifying? If that status quo persists, will we even survive as a species?
Knowing what I know now, I would have jumped ship in your shoes in an instant. After 5 years of that work you could be free from working ever again and do whatever you feel like. I've heard that RT for example can pay you up to 1M per year for entry level, and looking at their profit margins I don't really doubt it.
From my experience working in biotech I would say certainly a B.S. in a scientific field (like biochemistry, etc.) There is often a hard cap in the career trajectory without a PhD. Often there are enough PhDs out there that moving into management in industry often requires this vs. Stagnating as a lab scientist without a huge upward spike in income/responsibilities.
Definitely not a satire but the hard truth. Your kid might end up having a strong existential crisis about why pursuing a "science" field ends up with 80k salary jobs when with that effort you could just go to FAANG as a SWE with a much higher salary with a bachelor's degree. If you don't get there as a bachelor's, just go there with a master's.
The "strategy" is to get your kid interested in science enough so that they make a strong resume to a good college and have a strong foundation, then sway them to learn CS and get a SWE job.
This is the sort of comment that makes me really take a hard look at capitalism. The way I see it, scientific work is rewarding in and of itself. I don’t _need_ to make huge amounts of money if I’m doing something intellectually rewarding that contributes to our collective knowledge. Sure, add monetary compensation to your list of optimising constraints. But to make it the SOLE optimising constraint in your life? That’s tragic, IMO. Make enough. Do interesting things. Cultivate rewarding relationships. Be happy.
PhDs are massively taken advantage of. The whole "do it for passion" thing is literally used as argument to abuse them.
Little money, long hours, effectively up or out pyramid where most people gonl out, expectation that you will move in few years and partner will follow.
I suspect interacting with the real physical world and its realities and to realize one can affect it would be good, no matter what career they'd pick later. Picking a career in software development has been a good choice for bright kids for several decades now. In the long term view, the past is full of "good career choices for bright kids" that at some point no longer were not.
Its probably more reliable income though. Screw up in tech (not even big tech), or have some kind of life misfortune, and your salary can pretty quickly go to zero. Knowing how to reverse a tree on a whiteboard is not some kind of important skill that employers want.
I had the same question, but my response was: "at the end of the day, authoritarian politicians will order you what to think, and their media/technology lackeys will enforce those orders".
I think your assessment is not based on the current labor market. I am aware of scientists with a fresh B.S. making that much. I do agree that there is little economic value in most Ph.D. programs.
an 80k starting salary is hardly grim and if you happen to become a decent scientist or technician along the way there is usually work to be found, but yes, the phd mill incentive matrix is a blight and demonstrates broader misalignments in microcosm
This is a very much valid point. Science is amazingly cool, but gives you a pretty shit life.
I'll encourage my kids towards science as much as needed and let their develop their thinking while they're at it, and congratulate them for the enlightenment when they come tell me that working as a scientist sucks. It's still really good for them to pursue that career early, if it's what they enjoy.
To get kids into science, make the education system better. Less memorisation, more practical work. Accelerate things for those interested and remove those that aren't. I wanted to be a chemical engineer or pharmacologist but got so bored that I moved on to something else. Now I fiddle with code and do nothing of real value to society. At least I get paid well I supppose.
Lots of code is valuable to society. Find a product you believe in more if that's the problem. And a lot of software is very valuable but taken for granted.
To pick an arbitrary example, word processing removed all sorts of even less "valuable" work from the world: mailing thing around, extra printing, photocopying, physical filing, transcription services, and all sorts of related rote secretarial duties. Those jobs are gone and people do other things now... maybe they work in healthcare.
I'm sorry, but this is somewhat playing the victim.
If you really felt strongly about being a a chemical engineer or pharmacologist and benefitting society through that, the schoolwork being uninteresting doesn't sound like a big hurdle to overcome.
My friend Jerry and I and some friends have done a whole set of experiments on various aspects of making coffee, and if I can ever get him off the dime we'll be publishing them here.
So yeah, we Did Some Science. So can you. You can stop reading all these "experts recommend" stories about, e.g. not keeping your beans longer than two weeks, and just carry out a proper experiment on whether you can tell the difference. Who cares if the general population can tell if you can't?
"Doing science" means applying some basic techniques that anyone can learn. Especially the kids.
I remember my first "real" science experiment in school. We determined the saturation point of salt in water depending on temperature. Our teacher somehow managed to get us into a spirit where it was as if we were the first people to attempt to measure this. Nature would reveal its secrets to us!
It was just about the perfect experiment for 11 year olds, probably. We could understand what we were trying to find out and it seemed something that might actually be worth knowing! At the end of the class, would our measurements correspond with the figures in the book? If not, why might they not? And the Bunsen burner gets to come out, too! Very exciting. I think it might have been the first time I realized, oh, I could actually determine this myself, if I had to, using a scientific approach.
My hot take: early science classes are almost completely useless, infotainment-type courses. Much better to engage the interested young with math. Then they can get into real science courses when in highschool.
A little bit of wow factor from infotainment at an impressionable age can lead to lifetime interest that is far, far more impactful than the "educational" quality or content of these classes.
Not always of course but this kind of thing can definitely be valuable.
You can easily get kids engaged with both math and science. They aren't mutually exclusive.
There's nothing wrong with "infotainment". Some of the things which I experienced in elementary school which stuck with me the longest were when our gym teacher would play educational videos about human anatomy. A lot of these videos featured "Osmosis Jones"-style flythroughs of different organs. "Here's the stomach, it's filled with acid, etc." Netflix has The Magic Schoolbus right now. My wife and I were amusing ourselves by watching it for a few minutes last night, and I realized that the first episode (they visit each planet in the solar system on their bus, which had transformed into a space ship) had stuck with me almost verbatim, even though I haven't seen it in over 20 years. There are basic concepts that are quickly and easily imparted in this form (the sun is huge, the planets are very far apart, etc.) because of the visual format. Nothing wrong with this.
All this "infotainment" really helped develop my imagination and powers of visualization, both of which have paid dividends for me in the long run.
How "useful" a class is has as much to do with the instructor and the resources available to them as it does the particular pedagogical style. Should also be kept in mind that not everyone is going to become a scientist or use math on the job. The solution here isn't to eliminate "useless" subjects from school, but to focus on how to give people a broad education so that they can become informed and critical thinkers.