The silliest thing about the "children are natural scientists" line (which is common amongst scientists for whatever reason) is it actually underemphasizes how hard it is to be a scientist, and how many millennia it took before we really had "science" in the modern sense.
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Bad models of what science is do not further science. Science is an institution powered by people who have to undergo a lot of work to think differently than everybody else. If you think science is important you need to grasp that and its implications.
If everyone was, deep down inside, some kind of scientist, it wouldn't require funding or education or anything else. But everyone is not a scientist (as is plainly obvious). It takes immense work to think and act scientifically. And immense resources to sustain actual science.
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This seems rather elitist to me. It also reminds me of the myth that learning math is more difficult than learning how to read. Children, as a whole, have much more potential than your argument seems to give them credit for. To me it’s about accessibility rather than platitudes.
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It's not elitist to say that it takes hard work to get good at unintuitive, difficult things. That's the definition of education (and expertise). If you constrain education to the elite, then it's elitist.
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It also does not have a whisper to say about the potential of children. Children have the potential to become scientists. If they are trained in how to think like scientists. It takes a lot of work. It is not natural at all. If it was, it wouldn't be so damned hard to accomplish!
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(I guarantee you that my students — who are by an large STEM majors at the engineering school where I teach — would agree that being a scientist or engineer is not just about being creative or curious. It's about a LOT of hard work.)
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(Our school motto: "Per aspera ad astra" = "Through adversity to the stars." At this point in the semester my students are feeling the "through adversity" part of it!)
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So rather than "calling out" scientists, the goal here (for me, anyway) is to encourage them to not offer up lame platitudes that ultimately demean science. The relative newness of science with respect to humanity is a sign of its fragility and need to be nurtured and sustained.
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