Oxford Think Week - Education

Samantha Stein's talk about the educational ideology of Camp Quest UK drew a slightly smaller audience than the others I have attended this week, but was nonetheless interesting and very well presented.

She asked why she had had to wait until she was 19 to learn 'the scientific method'.  As she said, the combination of the scientific method, critical thinking and philosophy would help anyone in their search for facts.  These skills would help you to distinguish fact from fallacy while browsing the internet.

And yet schools concentrate on fact-based learning rather than learning to understand.

Even in a Physics degree course I'm not sure I learned about the scientific method.  I picked it up somewhere in my 30s and 40s.