For many, science is about pursuing mastery. Ms. Frizzle has always invited us to marvel instead.
Change is hard—like, super hard.
That’s the theme of the first episode of Netflix’s reboot series The Magic School Bus Rides Again. The episode was a rebuttal aimed squarely at the anticipated backlash from those of us who grew up reading the original books and watching the original cartoon. And it’s true: The show is different—new storylines, a new Ms. Frizzle (gasp!), and digital animation rather than the classic cel style. If ’90s kids can get past the cosmetic differences, though, we’ll find that the charm of The Magic School Bus remains.
The genius of the franchise, though, has never been in the things Netflix changed, but in what they kept: the way in which Ms. Frizzle and her class approach the wonders of the natural world. Though the eponymous school bus is, as it always was, able to transport the kids across space and time, Ms. Frizzle’s students are never more amazed at the magic of the bus than at the complexity and order of the world.
Far from distracting the students, the bus’s magic only aids the class in their pursuit of truth. By, say, shrinking into a raindrop, they’re not only able to know about environmental science—they’re able, in some sense, to know environmental science personally. The class never remains distant or removed from the world. Rather, they lovingly enter into the episode’s subject, literally encountering the world from the inside.
This intimate way of teaching is refreshing at a time in which science education too often prizes “objectivity” above all else. Rather than entering a garden to study a flower, the objectivist cuts the flower open in his lab, seeking to understand the flower’s totality ...
from
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