GERALD HOLTON
Science Education and the Sense of Self
If historians of the future look back on the history of the United States,
they will find two curious paradoxes. On the one hand, many of the
contributions to science and engineering in the United States in the
twentieth century will be counted among the major intellectual achieve–
ments. In addition, this better understanding of how the world works has
led to remarkable increases in industrial productivity in the human life
span, in agricultural yields, and so forth. Science and engineering will also
be seen as having played a major role in the Allies' victory in W orld War
II.
Of course, more needs to be done, and all too often the human race
has either failed to avail itself of useful knowledge or, ever since the in–
vention of fire, has found ways to abuse it. I know of no intellectual who
would dispute this, or who adheres to the flagrant scientism that now ex–
ists mostly in fiction and in the rhetoric of critics. But precisely within the
awareness of their limits, the sciences have achieved the moral authority
to be considered among the central components of the twentieth-century
worldview, on a par with the other major motivating cultural forces, such
as the arts, and what William Faulkner called the universal truths, those of
"love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."
From this perspective, given the essential place of the scientific view,
our hypothetical future scholars might reasonably expect that science edu–
cation in the schools and colleges of our day will have been of the same
high quality as the sciences themselves, and that the relation between sci–
ence and society was rendered in a sound and balanced way by the usual
purveyors of such information, our scholarly societies, academies, muse–
ums, and so forth. But it is just at this point that those future historians
will be startled to discover how wrong these reasonable expectations are.
That is the first paradox. I need not spell out the details. Weare all heart–
sick about the data, such as the fact that all but the most elementary
rudiments of science, mathematics, and engineering have been squeezed
out of the curriculum for the majority of college students. In some of our
Editor's Note: This essay was first presented at the New York Academy of Sci–
ences conference, "The Flight from Science and Reason," on June 1, 1995.
Reprinted with permission from the proceedings of that conference, published as
Volume 775 of the
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
