THE SCIENCE CLUB PHILOSOPHY                            (C)1995 Jim Burrows

We started the Science Club in 1987 to help children and their caregivers
understand the voluptuous and sensual character of learning.  It had
seemed to us that we spent entirely too much of our education on the
accumulation of unusable and disjointed facts and not enough time on art
and whimsy of the search.  We felt our goal should not be data for datas
sake but the skill of using data to solve problems, to spend our education
learning how to think not what to think.  We approached this mission with
the only tools we had.  Our own passion for learning and our sense of
humor.  We are still grateful for these tools as we are still learning and
we still make so many mistakes that a sense of humor is sometimes all that
stands between us and the funny farm.  The credentials for the science
club are many and extremely different from what one might expect from a
mainstream educational consultant.  While it is true that Kathy is a
teacher with fifteen years experience and a masters degree in educational
technology as well as a curriculum coordinator for a major school system,
The Science Club also represents those who do not thrive in traditional
school settings.  I was the only son of an American army officer and as
such traveled with my parents throughout the US and Europe as a child
sometimes attending a school for as little as six weeks before the demands
of the military moved my family on.  By age 16 I had attended at least
twenty different schools and by age 17 I quit high school and joined the
navy.  The result of this diversity is a thorough understanding of what
works and what doesn't work in education today.  The Science Club
continually amazes even the most cynical educators with our ability to
create an enthusiasm to learn that empowers even the most reluctant
children.  And yet we are constantly sharing our secret.  Kids love to
learn.  We get them excited and then we get out of the way.  Learning is
what our species does.  We have puny claws, lousy speed, paltry strength,
and even poorer reactions.  But what we can do is learn.  It is an
intrinsic skill that takes years of public education to eliminate.  What
the Science Club does is remind kids how much fun it is to figure stuff
out.  Any stuff.  Not just science but history, and literature and social
studies as well.  My statement that "Science is the art of the approach to
the unknown." is as applicable to history as it is to the study of
physics.  To often children are subjected to adults whose sole purpose
seems to be education as a process of elimination.  To separate the wheat
from the chaff.  The problem is these unengaged "chaff" grow up to be
unengaged, unchallenged adults with the rage that accompanies an
unfulfilled life.  Hold on.  You have got to know that this is truly what
I feel.  I also recognize that I dont hold any corner on wisdom or any
special franchise on the truth.  But I also want you to understand that
all of the people that make up The Science Club from our board of
directors to the teachers and kids in the 800 schools in which we have
presented programs to the parents at PTA and homeschool conferences we
presented, all of these folks have heard and supported, to some degree,
our efforts to bring about this vision.  To what degree they get it I cant
say but I can say that most schools we have been to we have been to at
least twice.  And it is these schools that have funded us since 1987.  I
have heard all of the lamentations about the miserable state of our
children.  I have personally seen and smelled the decay in many of our
schools. And yet I remember the story of the little boy who, after a great
storm wandered out onto the desolate beach and discovered the shore strewn
with the still live bodies of millions of starfish that had been stranded
there to die.  The boy reached down and flung one into the safety of the
water and then another and another.  When a old man approached him and
kindly offered the wisdom of son youll never be able to save all these
poor starfish the boy paused looking at him and then replied, no sir I
guess I cant but I can save this one and returned to his task.  The old
man said nothing and joined the boy in returning the creatures to the sea. 
Soon others joined them, then hundreds until all of the starfish had been
rescued.  Like that little boy I have no concern of the magnitude of the
project I am only concerned with what I can do. 


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Jim Burrows                                       THE SCIENCE CLUB
sciclub@eskimo.com                               School Outreach Programs
Seattle, WA