Re: Purchasing a student microscope

Eddie G writes:

Good luck getting your child to be a pianist without a piano.

It takes $1000s to test a child for microscopy talent by the "buy it and
see if he likes it" method. Much better to observe and analyze than to
spend and regret.

Talent and drive proceeds despite mediocre equippage. Equipment does
not replace talent and drive. The last step of any education is
equipping. You do not buy a drum set to start your kid on drums, you
use $20 worth of sticks and practice pads; if the kid won't play and
won't learn on those, he won't play or learn on the real thing. The
shiny stuff is a distraction.

A microscope sparks many kids' interest in science, even if they are
initially indifferent.

Sure there are cases of that. But the instrument is not the critical
factor. You can just as well say there are those who had an forming
interest that was extinguished by being over-equipped too early and
overwhelmed.

The public school fallacy is that everybody is smart and anybody can
learn anything. The parental fallacy is the same conceit, except you
apply it to just your kid(s). Homeschooling evades the former but is
still subject to the latter. The public schools say that IQ and the
bell curve don't exist, and that any additional educational effort,
whether in expense or starting earlier and running later, will yield
more educational results in students. That educational yield is in
proportion to educational spending. That any child can learn algebra,
microscopy, or any good thing, if we just push enough time and money at
them. Assuming we keep them off MySpace.

The truth is that not everyone can learn microscopy, any more than
algebra (notwithstanding the recent Florida law requiring all Floridians
to learn algebra, or no-diploma-for-you).

For any given worthwhile field of study X, there is no reason to invest
in equippage for X before properly detecting that genuine talent and
drive for X exists in the student. Which presupposes that the teacher
is knowledgeable enough about X and its pedagogy to detect latent
potential in a student. When you have naive parents and young students,
such detection is impossible, and buying into any given X is premature.
The more dependent X is on expensive stuff, the more critical this
principle becomes.

Microscopy is a science, but it also is a peculiar deception as
"science" for kids, because of the negligible amount of mathematics
involved. Math aptitude is a key marker of scientific intelligence, so
parents can be deceived that their hopes for scientific education of
their math-impaired kids can be fulfilled with a less-mathematical
science, when in truth the kid has no scientific gift, mathematical or
otherwise. Girls take biology, boys take physics. Feminine caring
about life, versus masculine building stuff.
.

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