A MacArthur winner wants every child in the world to own a microscope
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Have you ever noticed how famous writers often talk about how important reading and writing are, and how both are unfairly marginalized in schools?
Or how mathematicians lament the poor state of mathematical education, and how more focus should be placed on it in school?
Or computer scientists or programmers talk about how more kids should learn programming in school?
Artists and musicians are in the same boat as the writers, as the humanities are pushed aside in favor of STEM.
I'm not disagreeing with any of them. Education all around should and could be improved. I'm also not begrudging the leaders of any discipline for trying to get more interest in or more funding for the field they're most interested in and made a career in themselves (though there is a bit of a conflict of interest there). But it does make it difficult to decide just from these endorsements, which all tend to be very persuasive, as to which field to fund and prioritize.
Since the US is overall a very practical and business/career-focused country, it's not surprising that it would favor STEM over the humanities, but I do think it's kind of sad and that the country is losing something of great value. Life is not all about careers and technology, as much as those are the drivers of the US economy and the things that put bread on the table.
Some people seem to get this, see how STEM morphed into STEAM (adding arts), yet it is rarely translated into practice in schools.
Have access to, well for sure, seems good. But own one? Many 100s of millions of people will then have a piece of kit they use once or twice and then discard - a monumental waste.
Hopefully this is just reporting.
We need to share much much more. Yes, make amazing cheap instruments and educational tools, but share them. There's little utility in owning duplicates of what everyone else owns when you only use your copy once or twice (per time period).
In this instance each school having a class-set and library (or similar local amenity) owning lend-able microscopes would seem more than enough to make them available to everyone.
We bought ourselves a microscope as a family gift one christmas (c.5 years ago, Biolux NV [1]) it cost us less than that). It's had little use, primarily because we don't have enough room to have it set up (it gets dusty and needs cleaning a lot as well when it's out) and the desire to have a look at things that are super-small is often better served by looking it up on the internet. What does the yeast we just experimented with (we're making cider!) look like close up ... we could spend time getting the microscope set up, or take 30s and see it on the web. We do sometimes do it ourselves but usually you see more from looking at web images.
[1] http://amzn.to/2dbFuLm, aff link, wouldn't necessarily recommend it - it's OK, but I wouldn't pay that price, ~£50 is about right IMO. The cross table is a bit wonky and the USB camera relatively poor (works with Cheese on Kubuntu, but takes some getting going).
You're not thinking big enough. Microscopes aren't just a teaching tool, they're a powerful tool for observation of the world.
One example is soil microbiology identification, which can be learned in a couple days and used to guide rehabilitation of degraded agricultural soils.[1] A microscope can reveal pathogens in polluted water. And not to mention all the medical procedures that boil down to "prep it and look at it through a microscope."
The kids of today are the scientists and technologists of tomorrow.
Here's one video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHSys_pIEA
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/09/one-dolla...
There's also a formal paper describing it; there's more to it than first appears:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Kickstarter campaign coming, apparently. I want one.
Wouldn't books provide more sustainable and reliable education? What makes this the better investment?
OTOH I got really into collecting fossils, so what do I know about what is and isn't fun?
Personally I would take up a franchised "Mythbusters Comminity lab" happily
The whole family could sit on the sofa in front of the TV with the microscope and explore together.
(And yes I would want to be able to press a button and get high-quality screen captures that could be offloaded via a USB port.)
My "Remembering Sizes 2015" http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/RBigE has a video "What is micro view?" that illustrates this for 1000x.
But lets just be honest here, getting every kid in the world a microscope is a dumb idea. Most kids that have microscopes don't use them, they collect dust, and then get thrown away eventually. For the handful of kids that actually use them, the kind of microscope you would be able to afford to give out to everyone would be a piece of crap.
I'm talking about basic human needs. A microscope is a dumb thing to hand to someone that is hungry.
Author, as well as many other smart people, got consumed by his own world and his activities and mistakes them for everything that matters. Actually, what author, or programmers, or other specialists, are doing is but a fraction of things people should do. So not all kids should have microscopes, not all kids should be taught how to program etc.