There is a movement towards informal teaching and, in fact, science centres have informal teaching from the Exploratorium in San Francisco, where people are simply in an environment where they can play about, much as the scientist does actually with gadgets, with books, with ideas, and learn for themselves, but we have to be a little bit careful about this. I mean it would be ridiculous to expect anybody to recover the history of science in their own lifetime by their own endeavour, that in actual practice to do any sort of simple learning or science by self experimenting you need to have background knowledge, you need to know how to interpret the results of the phenomena that you see, and in my view phenomena do not speak for themselves. You can have, let’s say, a flash of lightening, it’s a wonderful phenomenon we can all agree it happens, you can then get the thunder a few seconds later, okay, why is it delayed, what is the thunder, how is it related to the flash? Now, unless you’ve got some sort of conceptual model, no way can you see how thunder is related to lightening. I mean is it the gods attacking us, which people used to think, or something naughty going on in a village and the village steeple gets struck by lightening in the middle of the night, or is it charges like an electric-static generator moving up through the air and stuff, you know, a completely different story? In other words, you need guidance for individual thinking, at the same time the individual thinking ultimately feeds into the system and changes the- what’s called the paradigm and the general way of thinking about the subject but the point I’m making is this, that the individual can do very little alone. You need the paradigm, the general way of thinking, the kind of phenomenon that this might be, you need to have understanding of how to test the ideas, it’s really a cooperative business, I think, learning. At the same time, it’s nice to provide a situation where people can do their own thing and I believe there’s a whole bunch of issues here that need much more thinking out than we’ve ever done and I think this is one reason why education is a mess. This relationship, you know, between individual endeavour in discovery and learning and then how far is it a shared activity, I think is something we need to think much more about in my view, really, for schools, universities, for living one’s life.
