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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7474966" data-attributes="member: 42582">Why would you be sure of that? It seems like a silly idea, and independenty of that, as a proposition about me, has no evidentiary foundation in anything I've ever posted.In any event: I'm sure that some people think that toddlers in art class are producing art. I tend to think they're learning some techniques that some people can use to produce art. That's not to say that calling it &quot;art class&quot; is a misnomer. English is a flexible language, and the adjective can describe the output of the class, the methods it teaches, its rationale, some conbimation of those three, probably other aspetcs too that I'm not thinking of.Likewise, school kids in science class are (i) learning some facts that are part of a body of scientific knowledge, and (ii) learning some techniques that can be used to do science. I don't think that many of them are doing science, in the sense of adding to the boy of human scientific knowledge. My take on the terminology is as above.What about a school kid who submits as his/her project the following: a careful record of the proportion of the angle of the sun over a certain patch of backyard at noon over a series of days, and of the temperature recorded by a thermometer stuck into that patch of dirt at 10 pm on each of those days? Without more it's a pretty marginal case, but it seems as closely connected to doing science as setting up an experiment from a set of instructions that someone else wrote already knowing what the outcome would be.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7474966, member: 42582"] Why would you be sure of that? It seems like a silly idea, and independenty of that, as a proposition about me, has no evidentiary foundation in anything I've ever posted. In any event: I'm sure that some people think that toddlers in art class are producing art. I tend to think they're learning some techniques that some people can use to produce art. That's not to say that calling it "art class" is a misnomer. English is a flexible language, and the adjective can describe the output of the class, the methods it teaches, its rationale, some conbimation of those three, probably other aspetcs too that I'm not thinking of. Likewise, school kids in science class are (i) learning some facts that are part of a body of scientific knowledge, and (ii) learning some techniques that can be used to do science. I don't think that many of them are doing science, in the sense of adding to the boy of human scientific knowledge. My take on the terminology is as above. What about a school kid who submits as his/her project the following: a careful record of the proportion of the angle of the sun over a certain patch of backyard at noon over a series of days, and of the temperature recorded by a thermometer stuck into that patch of dirt at 10 pm on each of those days? Without more it's a pretty marginal case, but it seems as closely connected to doing science as setting up an experiment from a set of instructions that someone else wrote already knowing what the outcome would be. [/QUOTE]

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