GERALD HOLTON
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about science learning. But that does not mean that inquiry must be lim–
ited to the mental "construction" by the leamer, or that scientific research
as such should be presented by that model. Also, the teacher should not
fail to challenge students to perform at the highest level each can achieve.
I believe the word "excellence" was mentioned only once in passing in
the draft. Nowhere did I see an attempt to get teachers actively to dis–
cover and nurture any extra or exceptional ability, the kind that might
make it more likely to produce a future scientist of special ability. Nor did
the standards suggest that teachers should get more adequate training in
science than most of them do now.
The philosophy underlying this version of course forbade using such
phrases as the progress of science or the evolution of scientific ideas. The
main engine of change in science was presented as having largely been the
result of "changes in commitment." "Changes in commitments ... forge
change commonly referred to as advances in science." Thus scientific ad–
vances are only tautological concepts, because anything scientists make a
commitment to is by definition an advance. What counts is not the dis–
covery of some new aspect of nature, but the sociological and
psychological interaction of the scientists. This view is part of the famous,
banalized picture of scientific work as the jump from one paradigm to an–
other as a result of changes of commitment in the social group, rather
than advancement through the enlargement of the range of applicability
of older conceptions, or the simplifications of theories, or the breakdown
of old barriers between fields.
Happily, this is not the end of the story of these National Standards
for Science Education. The final draft will be quite different, and accept–
able to scientists and students, teachers and parents, as it surely must be if
the standards are to be effective. But it is important to see how long it
took for scientists to wake up to what was happening and to go into ac–
tion. At a meeting that brought together some scientists to look over the
1994 draft I have just discussed, a few of them finally made clear how un–
acceptable this version was.
Science
magazine went so far as to say that one
of the physicists at that meeting confessed that he "went ballistic" after
reading the draft. Others there also objected strongly to the bizarre flaws.
With Bruce Alberts, the new president of the National Academy of Sci–
ences, taking particular interest in education and science, a much better
outcome could be expected, and a much improved version was put into
circulation for final comment and release in December 1995. If there is a
flight from reason and science to extremism, of which the early stages of
this episode were to a certain extent an illustration, what is required most
of all is simply that some scientists and their organizations begin to pay
