School curriculum offers answers to questions not usually asked by children while completely ignoring those issues that are intriguing to them. Below is a set of randomly chosen questions frequently asked by children aged 6 to 17 [4][5][6]:
Group a/
What happens when one falls into a black hole?
What was there before the beginning of the world?
Where does the world end?
What is there beyond the world's border?
Are there any other worlds?
How in reality the World was born?
Group b/
What does a cow have horns for?
What is dew for?
How does a bird fly?
How does magnet know where is the North Pole?
How does a TV set work?
How does a snowflake form?
Why does your finger hurt when you put it into boiling water?
When some particle collide, are they angry?
Why do black things (exposed to sun) get hot?
Why is something sweet?
Why is there a part of a rainbow?
In an accelerator, when particle are mooving from itself, it meaus they
are living?
Why does one thing bend while another one does not?
Why does a feather glide so funny?
Why are clouds feathery and sometimes puffy?
Why does soapy water bubble?
Why do things crack?
What is this made of? (a very common question)
Why do trees have splinters after breaking?
Can an astronaut pee?
How is a stone thrown?
Group c/
The following questions are heard seldom (or never):
Why do all objects fall in the same way?
Why does the Moon circle the Earth?
Why do magnets sometimes attract, and sometimes repel?
Why do the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees?
Why are paths of stones always similar in shape?
As far as the latter questions are concerned, children are in general satisfied with the answer "because that's the way it is".
The above questions can be roughly classified into three categories:
a/ questions of philosophico-cosmological nature,
b/ questions concerning the structure of matter,
c/ questions concerning the functioning of things, or flow of events, and
the sense of purpose (younger children).
Questions of philosophico-cosmological nature emerge very early - first in a naive form [7], and later on in a more mature way. In principle, they persist till the very end of virtually every thinking man's life. This interest in ontological problems results in an enormous success of popularized scientific books, like Weinberg's The first three minutes or Hawking's A brief history of time, books which are certainly too difficult for the average reader. Unfortunately this interest also lies at the origin of popularity of various pseudo-scientific books like those of Däniken, or even of pseudo-scientific gibberish.
Leaving these questions outside of school interest is a waste of opportunity. This is both a waste of opportunity to get students acquainted with scientific hypotheses and theories, and a waste of opportunity to shape their scientific outlook on life, as well as a waste of opportunity to stir up in them an authentic interest in physics, astronomy and cosmology. Poorly educated students constitute easy prey for pseudo-scientific nonsense. It is true that introducing these topics into school curriculum encounters difficulties. There appears here an epistemological conflict which makes that it is difficult to talk about the origin of the world to students who still think in concrete terms and lack facts (they can not know physical theories needed for explanation). In the history of mankind cosmology was a part of philosophy; these questions preyed on man's mind since the dawn of history, and thus it is not surprising that our children should have similar problems. Meanwhile, it is possible but extremely useful to introduce these issues from the very beginning of physics teaching.
And while evading questions of ontologico-cosmological character is just a lost opportunity, IGNORING questions from group b/ is a serious MISTAKE, since it leaves students with the impression that physics deals with an artificial world invented for its own sake. This impression becomes intensified when providing students with questions that are of no interest to them! - and this constitutes presumably the deepest epistemological obstacle in physics teaching.
The difficulty stems from the fact that physics has developed only because it started asking and solving questions, so to say, from a different perspective. Some problems were left to philosophers while physicists became interested not so much in the motion of a falling feather or coin but in the falling of ANY object. First they approached the problem of ideal liquid, and only later did they tackle that of viscous one. Mechanics of a material point was developed before that of a solid body. Physics of solids, which gives answers to "children's problems", requires quantum mechanics and statistical physics, which developed later on and may be studied only in a specific, and not just any sequence. Therein lies the epistemological conflict, it is unavoidable! Physics teaching methodology may seek ways of mitigating the conflict, and - what is more - it should search for ways of overcoming that obstacle.
Thus, this conflict consists in a collision between the structure of "ready - to-apply science" and a lack of structure, or underdeveloped structures in child's or novice's thinking.