“The 95 Percent Solution” was an eye-opening article because it further clarified what’s always sort of been in the back of my mind. Ever since I was a child, I knew there was a key difference between formally learning science in school and learning science in an informal environment. My mom would take me to places like the Museum of Natural History, the New York Aquarium, the Prospect Park Zoo, the Hall of Science, and never once did it occur to me that I was actually learning something about science. Although I have absolutely no complaints about my formal science education, I can’t help but remember how much more fun it was to learn about science in a place other than at school. And when I ask myself why I had more fun, I can only think of one thing: tests. As the article repeatedly states, free-choice learning was not a part of the formal eduction that school provided, at least for me. We all grew up in a society where you had to pass a certain exam to demonstrate that you could recall what you had learned in that class in order to move on to the next grade. But I feel like these tests were doing the exact opposite of what they were designed to do. Instead of actively learning and/or studying the material that was supposed to be on the exam, and actually retaining it even after the test was over, I found myself discarding the information as soon as I could. In fact, I am constantly hearing people complaining about a specific topic in a specific subject because it has no value in real life applications. I believe that our education system would definitely improve if people of the younger age groups had more reasons to learn, not just to pass a test and get it over with. On a side note, I found it pretty funny that, according to the article, people who pursued astronomy as a hobby were more knowledgeable about the subject than undergraduate astronomy majors. It only shows that you can’t force someone to do something unless they are truly interested in it.