Educated by the stars

Not all the children who’d benefit will make it to the planetarium at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, B.C. So, science educator Tamara Litke and colleagues take the planetarium to them at schools in and around Vancouver—a smaller, portable version of it.

“You can set up the planetarium in a library or gym or a music room,” explains Litke, program coordinator for the Space Centre. “It's inflatable by fans. There’s a computer and projector inside. You display on the ceiling and navigate through the stars.”

Inside the portable planetarium, or “starlab” as they call it, Litke uses the technology to fly students to the moon and, from there, farther out to the rest of the solar system. Then it’s off to more distant stars in the Milky Way. Then Andromeda, other galaxies, the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the inevitable questions.

The kids want to know if there are multiple universes. Can people fall into black holes? Is the sun going to explode and annihilate our planet? They’re reassured when Litke informs them no, they are not going to be sucked into a black hole, and it’s going to be something like five billion years before the sun blows up.

One third grader found the space journey so immersive that when it was over he needed convincing that they had been in the school library the entire 45 minutes. 

“The power of flying someone through the map we have of our solar system, Milky Way, and mapped galaxies provides a perspective like none other,” Litke says. “It’s like a tour of our cosmic neighborhood with current technology that demonstrates our location and our relationship to a much wider world.”

Couldn’t science education always be a little more like that?

Scientifically illiterate

Litke has a high opinion of the progressive curricula and approaches to teaching in her Canadian province, which emphasize place-based teaching, multiple intelligences, social-emotional learning, and the like.

Assessments of educational quality are not so positive in the United States, unfortunately. To be sure, there are committed teachers and administrators doing good work in many elementary and secondary schools. But overall, the picture is not bright, and this seems especially true in the case of science education.

It’s puzzling when you pair that reality with the fact that in many other ways America has excelled at science. (Up to this point, at least. Who knows how badly U.S. science will be damaged by the time the current administration in Washington is through with it?)

The U.S. invests many billions of dollars in scientific research. It’s pursued at world-class universities and research institutions that produce a constant stream of important scientific discoveries and attract students and researchers from all over the world.

If you didn’t know better, you might expect to find the same kind of science excellence across the K-12 sector. But at many, science teaching is degraded, as American Scientist once put it, if not absent altogether.

The National Library of Medicine reports that only 22 percent of American high school graduates achieve proficiency in science. On average, the report says, elementary schools devote less than 20 minutes a day to science.

Poor-to-mediocre science education—it goes back many years—helps explain the vast amount of scientific illiteracy we observe in this country, and how it fuels conspiracy theories and everyday idiocy.

It also reveals a terrible lost opportunity. With few exceptions, science education is not helping kids see the amazingness of what science reveals, whether it’s galaxies, stars, or the Earth with its dazzling array of plants, animals, and geological dynamics. Science should not be boring young people. It should be blowing their minds and fostering love of the natural world: an urge to experience it and protect it.

Excitement and awe

I’ve spoken about the need for holistic education reforms with Sam King, a former private school teacher who now does environmental education under the auspices of a handful of organizations including the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and the Deeptime Network.

King observes that education in this country tends to shuttle students from “hyper-fragmented subject to hyper-fragmented subject,” without teaching how those subjects relate to one another and to a student’s experience of being a human on this planet.

“Integral problems need integral solutions,” King says. “You can't alleviate climate change without engaging law, policy, economics, sociology, ethics, etc. You can't address biodiversity loss without engaging ecology, urban planning, geography, finance, etc. Education should be oriented accordingly.”

As for science, it’s bursting with potential for inspiring awe and wonder, for imparting important lessons about life and how to live it. The potential, alas, remains largely unrealized (although that seems to be in the early stages of changing).

You can’t place all the blame on schools. Many of science’s leading lights have discouraged the excited responses that scientific discoveries deserve, speaking of them with a dry, just-the-facts affect that fails to do them justice.

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” This is how the late Stephen Hawking once described scientists’ prevailing view of life’s and humanity’s existence. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg famously said that the more science learned about the universe, the more it seemed “pointless.”

The rejection of wonderment might be understandable given that religious creationists and intelligent design advocates stand ready to pounce on anything suggestive of fine-tuning and hold it up as proof of a divine hand. But it will not do.

We can all learn from the stars

Science in general and astronomy in particular can come alive for students—and for people of all ages—if taught as a grand saga, and with interdisciplinary approaches that make the 100-percent-valid connections with other fields such as art, literature, philosophy, religion, and environmental studies.

So argued the late cultural historian Thomas Berry. It was Berry who laid the philosophical and poetic groundwork for the encouraging work that’s getting underway these days through efforts like the Journey of the Universe project, the aforementioned Deeptime Network, and Big Think, as well as scientists with a gift for public engagement like Brian Swimme, Sean Carroll, and Brian Cox.

Berry urged a shift from a human-centric way of taking in the universe to one that celebrates our interconnectedness with stars, with other species, and with the natural world, recognizing the urgent human responsibility to protect the Earth. It is a shift we desperately need if we’re to have any chance of squeezing through the existential bottleneck of climate degradation, of creating a future in which humans, and all life, can flourish.

We can all learn from the stars. Their origins, movements, life cycles, and amazing creative capacities help us grasp the ways of the universe and how humanity fits into the story. With star formation as with biological life, we see a consistent pattern of growing complexity, of once-separate parts combining in novel ways and birthing new forms whose wholes are greater than the sums of their parts. Like biological life. Like healthy ecosystems. Like consciousness.

What makes life tick? Under what circumstances does it thrive? How do we get in sync for the betterment of our own lives, and all life?

Our pursuit of star knowledge is now powered by extremely capable telescopes, of course. But humans have long gazed and marveled at the stars. They have long used them for navigation, in both the practical and philosophical sense.

If we let their light in, stars can be our guides and teachers in this time, too. One of the sad realities about our hectic, mostly urbanized lives today is that light pollution, our impatience, and our fixation on digital screens (among other factors) prevent us from looking at the stars and truly seeing them.

Our star blindness, I think, contributes to the alienation from the universe and natural world that is such a disturbing part of life today. It adds to the strange sense of humanity having lost our bearings psychologically, spiritually, and philosophically.

Before fancy navigation technology, sailors and travelers of all sorts used the stars to find their way home. We could, too.