Qigong in science class?

A reader of this blog reports:

My children went to a [public charter] school in which pseudoscience was taught to them. However, it was something more insidious than “intelligent design.” It was Qigong taught as science. One of my daughter’s classmates fell unconscious while she was performing these exercises. Then the Qigong instructor ran to the victim and began moving his hands over her body, telling the students that he was healing her by moving his hands over her which was mainpulating body energy or “Chi.”

I assume that the girl was OK in the end … but, this gives one pause.
What should we say about the teaching of Qigong in public schools? What should we say about the teaching of Qigong as science?

First, let me set out my general views on what I want kids to get out of their early science education. Then, I’ll double back to deal with Qigong in particular.
While what a lot of people remember from their science classes (beyond free-floating anxiety) is a bunch of unconnected facts, I’ve always thought the most important thing to pick up about science is a feel for its methodology. How do you specify a question that science can answer? How do you figure out what kind of evidence is relevant? How do you work out what the data could mean (and what they couldn’t mean)? When is an approximate answer close enough to be useful? When is it close enough that you’re entitled to think you’re on the right track?
Thus, I think it’s important for science classes to give kids:

• Exposure to some of the questions — big ones and small ones — that different sciences have tried to answer. In a high school class on biology, chemistry, or physics, there are more or less canonical questions that “define the discipline”. (The working scientist will have a more complicated understanding of what defines the discipline, but will likely be OK with a high-school-science-class version being used in high school science class.) In an elementary school classroom, it may be more important that the questions are vivid and interesting than that they cover particular pieces of the scientific terrain.
• Experience making observations and using observations others have made. It’s useful to see how observations may put you in mind of certain explanations for what you see. It’s important to see how observations can help you test hypotheses. It’s also good to see how observations don’t automatically tell you what’s going on — that formulating hypotheses on the basis of observations is not an automatic process. And, trying to observe carefully (and do experiments precisely) lets you see just how many moving parts there are to account for in even simple systems.
• Practice evaluating explanations — especially competing explanations — for different phenomena. It’s a very good thing to see that some explanations fit better with the data than others. It’s also good to see that there are instances where two competing explanations may fit equally well with the data — at which point, there may be other things to consider when choosing between them. Also, it’s good to see that an explanation can be very useful despite not being a perfect fit with the data (or, despite not telling us everything we want to know about how the system works).

No, I haven’t spelled out a full elementary science curriculum, complete with specific content-related learning objectives. I’m giving the broad strokes.
There are lots of ways to skin this pedagogical cat. It would certainly be possible to use “obsolete” scientific theories as teaching tools, to show how scientific explanations have been refined over time. Looking at what you can explain with a geocentric two-sphere cosmos (including equinoxes and solstices), comparing Ptolemaic and Copernican explanations for planetary motions, and then comparing these to the Newtonian picture of the solar system — done by a skillful teacher — could be very cool. Understanding how we explain something now usually gets more interesting if you can get a flavor for how we explained it before (and why we don’t do it that way anymore). The process — and the principled ways scientists make decisions in that process — is the key thing.
So, conceivably, comparing the current Western/medical explanations of human physiology and health with competing explanations from other traditions could yield something fruitful. Students could ask, of each account:

• What phenonema is the account trying to explain?
• What patterns of explanation does the account use (e.g., what entities or events are important in the explanations)?
• What kind of support do advocates of this account offer for these explanations?
• What can I observe that is relevant to this account? (Are the entities and processes in this account observable? If so, how? Can others observe them, too?)
• How can I test the claims of this account (e.g., are there things I could observe that would let me know whether this explanation is wrong)?
• What kinds of things can’t be explained by this account?

Such a comparison would be a good occasion to make clear the methodologies characteristic of the scientific method, and how these may differ from other methodologies applied in other realms of human endeavor.
In other words, it seems to me that there’s a way one could deal with Qigong and other alternative ways of understanding human physiology that fits well with the pedagogical goals of the science classroom.
But, presenting Qigong to kids uncritically isn’t teaching them what scientific thinking is about. By the way, teaching them the germ theory of disease without walking them through a critical examination of the relation between explanation and empirical data would be just as problematic, unless your goal is to make good handwashers rather than kids who have learned something important about science.
If you’re interested, there’s a petition online to get the school in question to present the appropriate critical context for Qigong as science (or, if no critical context is given, to stop teaching it as science).