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most preS:lgtous colleges a total of only two out of thirty-two one–
semester courses are required in science and math - about six percent of
the educational experience. And those courses usually have to build on
the extremely tenuous foundation, if any, previously laid in high school.
And into this void flow negative and bizarre views of science and tech–
nology, from courses these students take outside science and from the
general culture.
This failure is traceable in large part to negligent acquiescence by
scholars, intellectuals, teachers, administrators, and above all, by the sci–
entists themselves. That in turn would not have even been thinkable if it
were not for a profound displacement which has occurred in the position
of science in our culture, at this so-called "end of the modern era." On
this point, I agree with the thoughtful analysis by Sir Isaiah Berlin, in his
book entitled
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of
Ideas.
He documents that many of the fundamental notions, which the
worldview of the West developed since the Enlightenment, are being
challenged in our time, as in various periods in the past, by the rise of a
worldwide movement that has the technical name "the Romantic Rebel–
lion." As he says, no one predicted that the current form of this rebellion
would be what dominates "the last third of the twentieth century." The
timidity and ineffectiveness, at least until very recently, of most scientists
and their scientific organizations in responding to what amounts to attacks
on their very legitimacy, are easy to document. I think it is wrong to fo–
cus only on the attacks themselves. They are part of an evolutionary
mechanism by which cultures are formed. But the feebleness of the at–
tempts to understand the attacks, and to oppose them - that constitutes
the second paradox.
There are numerous illustrations of the challenge to the legitimacy of
science that has been appearing within the science education movement
itself - that is, not in books by individual gurus or on the crazy corner of
the Internet, but right in the publications and activities of teams of intelli–
gent, well-educated and, on the whole, well-intentioned persons charged
with the business of education.
It
is exactly such products that are most
revealing of the role science is thought to play in American cultural life
today.
The first document is a draft of the
National Science Education Standards
for Grades K-12. This project started with excellent intentions and under
the best possible patronage. The National Research Council of the Na–
tional Academy of Sciences was commissioned to draft such standards in
1991 by a group including the U. S. Secretary of Education, the National
Science Teachers Association, the National Science Foundation - all this
in the wake of the 1989 declaration of the nation's fifty governors, who
