Comment by scott_s
6 years ago
I think you were unfortunately downvoted. I think you're mostly accurate, but I think all sciences at the undergrad level don't teach how to do science. They teach about science. Yes, I know that there are labs, but that's rarely the emphasis. A physics and chemistry student is mostly learning things that other people have discovered and figured out. It's not until the graduate level that someone actually starts doing science as opposed to learning about science. And a lot of that is necessary: in order to be a productive scientist in any discipline, there is a lot of background material you need to understand first. The bar of entry to adding to our scientific knowledge is very high.
But, I think it would be good to include more philosophy of science - what does it mean to do science - at the undergrad level.
A physics or chemistry student is learning about empiricism on lab courses, and about how other scientists came-out with their advances. But more importantly, they are mostly studying science itself, not how use it to create practical stuff.
I don't disagree with your comment, and I don't think your comment disagrees with mine. I was agreeing with dahart that a computer science undergrad curriculum is mostly not about doing computer science, but then pointing that that is true for all sciences.
Most of the computer science curriculum is explicitly engineering. Even the courses we call theory are about how how to engineer better, more like what a mechanical engineer does when studying thermodynamics than what a physicist does when studying the same subject.
I do agree that none of them are doing science, but one is studying science itself, the other is studying a slightly different thing.