Educational Leadership - September 2009

No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it.

therapy, for example—I can say without hesitation that knowing how to apply the scientific method in one field doesn’t take you very far when you go into another. In the same way, I would argue that the quasi-mystical belief that students need to “know what scientists do” is misguided. There is, in fact, no magical scientific method, no silver bullet that, once mastered, will enable someone to easily acquire knowledge of new science. If you expect your students to understand molecular biology, you have to teach them molecular biology. You don’t teach them physics and hope that this knowledge will help them understand stem cells. It won’t.

The New Science

No one has really addressed one
aspect of science education that
we’re going to have to grapple
with in the near future. The fact of the
matter is that science has undergone a
sea change over the past 50 years
because of the introduction and avail-
ability of the computer. From the time of
Newton until the mid-20th century,
scientific explanations involved the
increasingly sophisticated use of
calculus. But as sophisticated as the
mathematical methods became, they
were still essentially pencil-and-paper
operations, which means that scientists
could only deal with relatively simple
systems. A calculation involving the
orbits of all the planets in our solar
system was beyond their power.

Computers have changed all that because they can keep track of huge numbers of factors at the same time. This means that in the past 50 years, science has progressed steadily into explaining more and more complex systems. The global circulation models

A New Building Code

I like to think of the great ideas of science and scientific literacy as constituting a kind of building code for education. If you want to erect a building, various codes tell you the minimum standards you must meet. For example, detailed rules stipulate how many electrical outlets have to be on each wall in your house. The code guarantees that no building will be constructed if it fails to meet a certain standard. You can exceed those standards if you want to, but you can’t fall below them.

In the same way, no student should be allowed to leave the education system without acquiring the basic knowledge of the physical world incorporated in the great ideas. Only then will we be sure that students will be able to become fully participating members of our modern technological society. In the best of all possible worlds, we will turn out students who far exceed this minimal building code of knowledge. I would certainly expect more of university graduates, for example.

What follows, then, for the organization of instruction? One clear implication of the argument for scientific literacy is that students must be exposed to the whole spectrum of science, not just a part of it. Every student needs to know something about the standard triumvirate of subjects—physics, chemistry, and biology. Further, the oft-neglected earth and environmental sciences have to be included as well. These areas of study should be integrated into the regular science courses— climate change in physics or chemistry, ecology in biology, and so on.

We do not underestimate the difficulty in carrying out this task. Teachers

would, first of all, require training in integrated science. The important thing at this point is to highlight the requirement that after graduation, students should be prepared to take on issues involving science.

A Word About
the Scientific Method

One issue often raised in discussions of science education is the question of the proper role of something called the scientific method. All science educators are located somewhere on a continuum between those advocating the teaching of method and those advocating the teaching of content. (In case you haven’t guessed, I’m located toward the content side of this continuum.)