From Walter Isaacson's bio of Albert Einstein:

While in Boston, Einstein was subjected to a pop quiz known as the Edison test. The inventor Thomas Edison was a practical man, getting crankier with age (he was then 74), who disparaged American colleges as too theoretical and felt the same about Einstein. He had devised a test he gave job applicants that, depending on the position being sought, included about 150 factual questions. How is leather tanned? What country consumes the most tea? What was Gutenberg's type made of?

The Times called it " the ever-present Edison questionnaire controversy," and of course Einstein ran into it. A reporter asked him a question from the test. "What is the speed of sound?" If anyone understood the propogation of sound waves, it was Einstein. But he admitted that he did not "carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books." Then he made a larger point designed to disparage Edison's view of education. "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think," he said. ***

Einstein stressed critical thinking as important to education over pure factual knowledge.
Einstein commented that his schooling required the obedience of a corpse. The effect of the regimented school was a clear-cut reaction by Einstein; he learned to question and doubt. He concluded: . . . youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies.

He showed no signs of being a genius, and as an adult denied that his mind was extraordinary: I have no particular talent. I am merely extremely inquisitive.

He failed his entrance examination to the Zurich Polytechnic. When he finally passed, the examinations so constrained his mind that, when he had graduated, he did not want to think about scientific problems for a year.

His final exam was so non-distinguished that afterward he was refused a post as an assistant (the lowest grade of postgraduate job).

Exam-taking, then, was not his forte. Questioning deeply and thinking critically was.

Einstein had the basic critical thinking ability to cut problems down to size: one of his greatest intellectual gifts, in small matters as well as great, was to strip off the irrelevant frills from a problem.

When we consider the work of these three thinkers, Einstein, Darwin, and Newton, we find, not the unfathomable, genius mind. Rather we find thinkers who placed deep and fundamental questions at the heart of their work and pursued them passionately. Would that we had students who did the same.

When a culture teaches its young that religious mythology is truth and that modern science is a conspiracy of lies then that culture will breed a generation of dogmatic stagnation not fluid exploration.

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."   George Orwell

"Telling a story is one of the most persuasive means of communication...How we persuade is how we deliver and tell our story to the jury. Storytelling is the most basic means of communication."
-Gerry Spence, renowned Trial Attorney

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
-Richard Dawkins

Sir Martin Rees - "I think it would be a real cultural deprivation if everyone could not share the mystery and wonder of the cosmos that modern science reveals to us the emergence, from simple beginnings, of stars and planets, and the intricate evolution on Earth of life and intelligence."

The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton's dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. Sire, Laplace replied, I have no need of that hypothesis.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson

"...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."

"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

Albert Einstein

The Importance of Connecting the Scientific Dots & Telling the Greatest Story Ever Discovered. The evolution of the Cosmos and the evolution of life on Earth deserve attention early and often in education.

"Telling a story is one of the most persuasive means of communication...How we persuade is how we deliver and tell our story to the jury. Storytelling is the most basic means of communication." -Gerry Spence, renowned Trial Attorney

Society needs Scientific Storytellers who can inspire young minds to greatness in thought and discovery.  Science Education suffers in America because there lacks an early and interesting interdisciplinary approach to explain the origins and evolution of the Universe. Science education in public schools is failing to connect the dots and lacks the grand Cosmic story that fuels the flames of genius. We need more classes and more teachers who are able to present the greatest story in the Universe. From the big bang to big brains. Cosmic evolution and Earth life evolution need to be explained in a way that gives young minds a more expansive perspective in this life.

 Unfortunately in parts of America it is taboo to even talk of Charles Darwin and evolution. With this cultural barrier young minds are being robbed of the amazing and inspiring true story of our place in the Cosmos. The Grand Story if told often and correctly to young minds has the potential to have a greater unifying impact on the way humans relate to each other than any other made up ideologies.
Science at an early age can open one up to the wonder of the Universe but dogma at an early age can limit and close the mind to puddles of ideology when there is an ocean of knowledge waiting for someone to dare to know.
 Carl Sagan stated, "we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers" and  "We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering."

It is important to connect the A B C’s of science because it is possible to create more interest in science and give more humans a greater perspective of life on Earth and how our connections to life and each other are both deep and consequential. The Grand story of life in the Universe is a story that unites us and is greater than any smaller story of religion, culture or nation that divides the human species. As Sir Martin Rees stated Science is the truly Global Culture. It is compartmentalization and not connecting the dots that keeps even educated adults ignorant of the evolutionary history of life.

Education in America is only a means to a job and lacks vitality and innovation to be a force for wisdom and understanding. The possible benefits early interdisciplinary Science:

More scientific interest and innovation and greater awareness of what unites humans is an important meme for human society.

Religion has had its free reign to limit and divide the young minds at an early age. Religious stories do not compare with the Cosmic evolution story that science has to offer. The problem is that the religions have taken advantage of telling stories to the youth and connecting their religious dots. Religion has been telling a story early and often. Science is coming too late and in puzzling pieces for our youth. We are story telling primates and stories are what stay with us. Science needs more story tellers of the Cosmos on the origins and evolution of life in the Universe. We need them in our classrooms in elementary school.  We are story telling apes and our stories have the power to influence our brains and our ideas.

Society is hiding the wonder and reality of the Universe from the children in America because our education system fails to connect the scientific dots and allows religion and cultural anti-intellectualism to bully our schools into silence.

Society is failing children by hiding the reality of the world from them and by not sharing the wonder of the story of Cosmic and Earth evolutionary history. 

Sir Martin Rees - "I think it would be a real cultural deprivation if everyone could not share the mystery and wonder of the cosmos that modern science reveals to us the emergence, from simple beginnings, of stars and planets, and the intricate evolution on Earth of life and intelligence."

  "After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?"
Richard Dawkins