Des lieux de connaissance
- On n’apprend bien que si l’on est, soi-même, actif. Cela peut se faire dans des lieux de connaissance comme le palais de la Découverte ou l’Exploratorium de San Francisco. Le visiteur intrigué s’implique pour comprendre. Pour avoir des réponses on sollicite les autres, mais aussi les chercheurs par l’intermédiaire d’écrans interactifs. De proche en proche, on crée son cheminement qui suit une logique personnelle. Ainsi les expériences et toutes leurs émotions enrichissent la mémoire, affinent les intuitions, créent des reconstructions mentales.
- le physicien atomiste F.Oppenheimer disait que « les gens doivent se rendre compte qu’ils sont capables de comprendre » De plus en plus, on trompe les gens, on continue de les faire succomber au mirage de la technologie moderne qui, soi-disant, réglerait nos maux. Ma grand crainte est que l’on entrave ainsi, a la base, la démocratie, avec des discours du genre « c’est trop complique a expliciter, c’est impossible a saisir pour des non- connaisseurs ! »
- Pourtant, nos sociétés sont aujourd’hui devant des choix profonds qui nous concernent tous : la procréation assistée, les tests génétiques ou l’euthanasie. Quelle exploitation fera-t-on des plantes et animaux transgéniques ? Va-t-on laisser la machine de l’innovation scientifique décider a alla place des citoyens pour leur vie, leurs maladies, leur gènes, leurs enfants, leur environnement, leur mort ? Des questions fondamentales qui devraient intéresser les citoyens que nous sommes.
How to Learn
1. At school and high school more often, gain knowledge, learn it by heart. Is this really the best way to understand the world? If you know that Mars is a planet that feed on plants because of their chlorophyll, it does not suffice to get an idea about the origin of the solar system or on how trees live in "eating" of carbon dioxide. He questioned the environment, imagine the models, experiments.
2. What matters here is curiosity, the questions you want to ask, what surprises you, fascinates you. Mars is at what distance from us? What gear it is already an approach? What did he see? Then we start to move from one idea to another, to articulate a whole bunch of concepts. So only the landscape is built ... For nothing is given in advance, final. We must imagine that we gradually discover how to "walk" els things, living beings.
3. Most of the time, the school has knowledge immutable, as fixed. It offers a kind of accumulation of information as if a well-made head was a head very satisfied. We rarely talk about people who seek why diseases were contagious, how did the solar eclipse, in what ways hurricanes are born ...
4. the education system is a heavy machine. It often feeds on passivity, hardly compatible with learning. Nothing else like it keeps the same form for over a century. There is a kind of tacit coalition so that our children identically reproduce what we have known.
Places of knowledge
5. One learns that if one is, oneself, active. This can be done in places like the Palace of Knowledge Discovery and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Visitors intrigued involved to understand. For answers we seek others, but researchers through interactive displays. Gradually, it creates a path that follows a personal logic. Thus all their emotions and experiences enrich the memory, sharpen insights, create mental reconstructions.
6. F. Oppenheimer, the atomic physicist said that "people should realize that they can understand" Increasingly, it deceives people, we continue to succumb to the mirage of modern technology, so-called , solve our problems. My great fear is that one barrier and, at the base of democracy, with speeches like "it's too complicated to explain, it is impossible to grasp for non-geeks! "
7. Yet, our societies are now faced with choices deep concern to us all: assisted reproduction, genetic testing or euthanasia. What operating Will we transgenic plants and animals? Will we let the machine decide scientific innovation has went up citizens for their lives, their illnesses, their genes, their children, their environment, their death? Fundamental questions that should interest us citizens.