Over the course of the last year or two I’ve become a fervent believer in the power of “projects” as an avenue to learning. Theory can take you quite a ways, but there is nothing quite like actually diggin into the books or getting your hands dirty in the shop or laboratory. For pedantic types, this requires a leap of faith. If you don’t go through the textbook and read each and every chapter, point by point, and learn each item, then you will not really “know” the subject. To that the project-oriented learner will simply shrug and reply that when it comes right down to it, he or she knows what’s necessary to work in the subject, and what they don’t know, they can learn easily enough.This, by the way, is a perfect description of the two main learning styles people have: “bottom up” learners like to start from first principles or the first page of the textbook and work their way down. “Top down” learners like to start with the big picture and assemble bits of information in a kind of non-linear way until they have a clear understanding of the subject. I’ll want to talk about that more in another intstallment.

But one thing I’ve noticed about projects as a learning vehicle is that information and know-how seems to stick better when you are actually applying this. Recently I contributed a rather long letter to the editor of “The Citizen Scientist”, the bi-weekly publication of the Society for Amateur Scientists about the sad state of science education in the US. You can read the letter for yourself, but the general thrust is that college-level education is becoming harder to obtain, and that the US lacks leadership at both the political and general cultural levels. I made comparisons with John F. Kennedy’s ability to compell the US to go into space and how that program gave us an entire generation of competent scientists and engineers.

What didn’t occur to me until after I had written the letter (isn’t that the way it always goes? Thank god for blogs!) was that in addition to leadership, Kennedy did the one thing that was bound to generate huge quantities of expertise: he assigned America a project. A science project. The Great Grand Bull-Moose Mother-Of-All-Science-Projects: go safely to and from the Moon, and you have less than a decade to do it. Once we got involved in the project, the science education sort of saw to itself.

What projects could Americans be put to that might inspire a new generation of scientists? New energy technologies come to mind, along with alleviating or forestalling the effects of global climate change. But marshalling all of America’s amazing intellectual potential needs funds and leadership. And thus far, I don’t see enough vision and leadership to make me think that the next scientific revolution will happen here.