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Thanks all for a rich conversation. No, no "answers," but I certainly came away with some new ways of thinking about the issues, can see that others did too. And maybe our thoughts here can/will contribute to others thinking in new ways as well. A few things that struck me ...

There is, of course, still a tendency for people committed to the sciences to be, at best, somewhat indifferent to and relatively ignorant of other academic programs and, at worst, somewhat derisive about them. And a tendency of people teaching "academic" subjects to have the same perspective on non-academic things. See Education as a Fragmented Culture: A Field Study.

It would be interesting/worthwhile to have some commentary by students, but my intuitions are that this sort of fragmentation does indeed contribute to students feeling a gap between not only science education and their own lives but the classroom educational experience in general and their own lives. And hence to educational experiences that are less engaging/successful than they might be at most educational levels and in most educational contexts.

Its worth making explicit that the fragmented cultures problem is not at all unique to K12 education. It exists equally at college and university levels, and in lots of social contexts beyond the educational realm (see Some Thoughts on Academic Structure and Socio-Political Structures Generally). Indeed the problem may be least in childhood and in early education and get progressively greater as one moves through the educational system and beyond it. Perhaps there is, in that, some useful hints both about the underlying character of the general problem, and how to address it? For more along these lines see Exploring Interdisciplinarity and The Brain, Story Sharing, and Social Organization.

What particularly struck me from our conversation yesterday is a recognition not only that science course work but school work in general after very early levels moves away from any conversation about love, hate, friendships, community and other aspects of relations to a wider universe, ie about unanswerable questions. We all of course deal with such questions every day in our own lives and yet seem reluctant to bring them into the classroom, and tend to discourage our students from doing so. My guess is that we are probably insecure about our own answers to such questions and fear being seen as indoctrinators, and so prefer leaving such questions to be answered in other contexts (family? church?).

The problem with that approach is that what we offer in classrooms seems dry to our students, disconnected from what actually matters to them. Maybe we could do better if we recognized that what we can offer our students in regard to big questions isn't "answers" but rather "stories", candidate ways to think about things that they can build from to make their own stories? Then we could not only make our classrooms more interesting, but help our students learn how to listen to, evaluate, and revise stories they hear in other contexts as well?

To do this, we would need to ourselves more fully embrace the value of multiple stories, to learn to hold less tightly to our own stories, to make them more available for others to use and allow them more readily to be influenced by the stories of others. And that would mean, among other things, becoming less protective of disciplinary allegiances and taking more advantage of interdisciplinary exchange. More exchange with our colleagues could make the offerings in our own classrooms more engaging to our students, and help to assure that things important to the lives of our students don't fall through the cracks of a fragmented educational culture.

Along these lines, I was encouraged by the enthusiasm with which everyone embraced the suggestion that it is not "science" (nor art, nor history, nor ...) that is "the greatest of all adventure stories" but rather "inquiry," which spans and is common to all of the disciplines. Yes, there are barriers, institutional and otherwise, to working together under a common umbrella, but perhaps we could commit ourselves to whatever movements we can make in that direction, both for our students and for ourselves. And have some confidence that those movements would in addition contribute to reshaping the culture within which we work, to reducing the fragmentation that gets in the way of richer and more satisfying educational environments for everyone.