Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts

Thursday, January 29, 2009

The hell with Pluto (the dwarf planet AND the minor Disney character)

I was recently reminded that I simply do not understand the emotional attachment that people had to Pluto as a planet. It's another dinky ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt! I don't want to get caught up in semantics, but we should at least lump it in with similar objects in terms of composition and formation.

But I have a serious question here: is the attachment to Pluto a symptom of bad science education in this country? Have we failed at conveying that science is a system of inquiry, and not just a list of facts?