The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
Journals of Yesteryear
Science for the Masses
God and Physics in San Francisco
By Larry L. Dill
Originally published in the New Hope Journal online Summer, 1997
In the summer of 1996 I had the privilege of attending the Teacher Institute at the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. I was enrolled in a three week course called “Middle School Physical Science.” Though I was teaching Adult Education classes in Texas at the time and had no formal training in physics or science teaching, most of my classmates in the institute were certified science teachers in California public schools. Our two principal instructors for the session were energetic, veteran physics teachers with degrees from MIT and Berkeley. Both were published authors of k-12 science teaching curricula. Most of the 45 hours of class time consisted of hands on demonstrations by these instructors and other Exploratorium staff members of physical laws and principals that could in turn be used by us in our own classrooms. The main focus of the course was on light and human visual perception. We made cardboard cameras and developed film, we dissected cow eyes (real ones) and we examined the properties of light by using mirrors, light boxes and various pinhole devices. All in all the course was great fun and I learned a lot. But I also came to some startling conclusions about the nature of science education in America.
What follows is an essay that grew out of my experience in San Francisco. In it I explore two distinct but clearly interrelated areas of concern. The first is how we view “science” as a phenomenon in human culture. On the last day of my session at the Exploratorium, I presented my concerns in this area to my fellow participants in the form of a discussion of the relationship between science and religion. I tape recorded the discussion and parts of the transcript appear below. I was impressed by the self assurance and professionalism of my colleagues who spoke up in the discussion; but I was surprised by what I interpreted to be a general consensus that science really can’t talk about religious issues.
Most public debate about the importance of science education, revolves around two charges, one by the multicultural/critical theory camp that sees scientists as ignorant of their own subjective biases; the other charge is made by scientists themselves, that the public is uninformed about the true nature of their work. My own view is that a large part of the educated public, including many teachers, even many science teachers, do not possess a sufficient foundation in the history of ideas to understand the implications for certain cultural traditions like religion, of the current operating theories in physics, biological evolution , and neuroscience. There is no question that the suppression of religious freedom in the former Soviet Union was badly handled; but American culture, with its constitutional guarantees against religious persecution, has created an equally debilitating flaw in its own scientific education through its insistence not only on the political separation of church and state but on the avoidance in k-12 and most college courses of a frank discussion of the intellectual conflicts between religion and science. This attempt to prevent cross corruption of mutually exclusive cultural domains, however well-meaning, has inadvertently created a vast intellectual no-man’s land where the educated and the uneducated alike, slosh about in a sea of myth, misinformation and the denial of many of the obvious social implications of modern science.
Because of the “boxed-in” sense that many scientists and science teachers have about their professional roles (see the transcripts below), science education suffers from a kind of hermetic quality that is nowhere more in evidence than in the conceptual flatness of modern science museums. Thus the other area of concern to be addressed in this essay is the design of science teaching centers. As a model of “hands-on” science museums, the Exploratorium represents, as far as I know, one of only two major types of science museums in existence in the world, the other being the much older “natural history” type exemplified by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. One of the reasons, it seems to me, that the National Science Foundation would fund a teacher institute at a science museum is that it already has the teaching tools and human resources in place to actualize a multimedia science teaching model that can be modified to fit any grade level or educational milieu. Most major cities in the U.S., and many around the world, have at least one or the other of these two types of museums. Some have both. Despite their weaknesses, I am convinced of the pedagogical superiority of the museum format to almost any other form of educational paradigm, including books, television, film and the internet (which, incidentally, are all used widely as elements inside many of these museums), and even including schools as we now know them.
I will suggest in this essay a number of ways that these museum models can fulfill their enormous potential for raising the overall level of scientific sophistication of the entire nation. Achieving such a goal will involve much more than raising funds to create small scale versions of these big city museums. Both hands-on museums like the Exploratorium, and conventional science museums like the American Museum of Natural History, lack key conceptual elements that, as I see it, are essential to any successful attempt to use them to increase scientific literacy in America. My ideas on how I believe these museums ought to be modified to achieve their potential, are inextricably bound up with my concerns about what is wrong with the way we view science in modern culture and thus the two concerns will come together in this essay in a unified philosophy of education that utilizes science museums as an essential teaching tool. The National Science Foundation and its collaborative educational organizations in the public and private sector, including leading universities and science museums, must take the lead in any effort to bring universal scientific literacy to k-12 children and the “educated” public as well. Until science educators are ready to confront science’s truly revolutionary relationship to religion, poetic myth, and traditional cultural ideologies, only a handful of the most agile, interdisciplinary scholars will be able to grasp the full impact of modern science on the history of ideas. Until curricula is written and science centers are designed to tell the whole story of the paradigm conflicts between religion, art and science, scientific literacy for the masses will remain little more than an illusion.
Does Science make Religion Obsolete?
The following transcript is from a tape recorded discussion I led on the last day of my session at the Exploratorium. N order to preserve the spontaneous flavor and rhythm of an unrehearsed forum, I have deliberately minimized grammatical and syntactical changes in the transcript.
Dill: Last week what I said I wanted to talk about was my own concern about how we worry about the connections or conflicts between these domains (art, science and religion) when you’re teaching. And I wanted to hear from some people who consider themselves predominantly scientific in terms of what they do about these other areas. But during the course of the week I’ve gotten to know some of you better, and now I’m afraid I’m gonna offend somebody whenever I talk about religion…(some laughter)…because I think there are some people who are sort of…kind of…sort of have some religious aspects to their lives…but…but let me….this guy says it better than I do so I just want to read this little quote. This is Francis Crick of Watson and Crick, [the discoverers of] DNA. He talks about how spirituality and people having souls is pretty much a common belief. Some sort of soul.
(Reading to th group now from a copy of “The Astonishing Hypothesis” by Francis Crick [Scribners, 1994), p.4])
Most religions hold that some kind of spirit exists that persists after one’s bodily death and, to some degree, embodies the essence of that human being. Without its spirit a body cannot function normally, if at all. When a person dies his soul leaves the body, although what happens after that--whether the soul goes to heaven, hell or purgatory or alternatively is reincarnated in a donkey or a mosquito--depends on the particular religion. Not all the religions agree in detail, but this is usually because they are based on different revelations…
Yet a minority of people living (including a large number in the former Communist countries) is inclined to a totally different view. Such people believe that the idea of a soul, distinct from the body and not subject to our know scientific laws, is a myth. It is easy to see how such myths could have arisen. Indeed, without a detailed knowledge of the nature of matter and radiation, and of biological evolution, such myths appear only too plausible.
Why, then, should this basic concept of the soul be doubted? Surely if almost everyone believed it, this is, in itself, prima facia evidence for it. But then some four thousand years ago almost everyone believed the earth was flat. The main reason for this radical change of opinion is the spectacular advance of modern science.
Now. So if you’re science teachers and you are teaching as I have, evolution, and somebody in your class says, “Hey. I don’t believe that stuff. It’s just a theory.” I mean there are all these issues about what you can and can’t say because the principal will tell you you can’t, or whatever, in the school and the policy and all that. But beyond that what do you do? I want to hear what… To me science is a new way of looking at the world…just like looking at the world as round. It’s emblematic to say that the world is round rather than flat. We now know that it is. So the old idea is obsolete. It seems to me that science makes religion obsolete. (some rumblings in the group) Now, I’m gonna get a little rise. Why not?
Participant #1: Ah, Science…ok. Science is a little bitty box. Science is something you can prove by the testimony of your five senses. And it’s something that can be reproved and witnessed by everyone the same way with the five senses. And that’s …it works really well for building cars and rockets, or predicting big storms…
Dill: Yeah, but that sound more like engineering than science.
#1: But these are laws of science that make it possible to do these things. And that’s a very small little box.
Dill: Inside of what?
#1: You are boxed in by your five senses and the testimonies of them. But actual reality and a person’s own life and what shapes it, is much wider than that.
Dill: Where’d you get that?
#1: I just feel it.
Dill: Through what?
#1: I can’t tell you.
Dill: It’s not one of your senses?
#1: I can’t tell you what the five senses…
Dill: It’s not coming through sensation?
#1:Not the five.
Participant #2: I see what you’re saying, Larry, and I agree with you up to a certain point. But to say that science makes religion obsolete is…is…if that were true, it would almost be a very, very scary place to live in because…according to scientific principles, we’re just walking upright apes; and that means to me that no matter how evolved our spirituality becomes we’ll still be a group of angry, violent, warlike people that assassinate each other (some laughter) with alarming irregularity, because that’s what we do. On this planet it’s…you know
Dill: Yeah, but don’t we usually do that in the name of some sort of religion?
#2: Yeah. People…Of course people do it in the name of religion. But people also do it in the name of science, in the name of politics and policy and “my political belief is better than your political belief…I’m gonna kill you…my side,,,” and even in science I think it becomes very true…because it’s very…“my scientific advancements are more important than your scientific advancements and my science is so much more powerful than your science that I’m gonna prove it.” I mean that was what the Strategic Defense Initiative was all about. And so it that way…and I hesitate to use the term “religion” because…you know…just because it…in my own mind it denotes some very negative qualities. I mean I would almost take “religion” out of tere and make it “spiritualit,” so it’s “art”, “science”, and “spirituality.” And they all very much agree because we can have a logic of science…but without the spirituality to drive us…
Dill: Well, let me ask you this?…
#2:…we’ll be killing each other until…and science dictates that we’ll be killing each other until we’re eradicated off the face of the earth.
Dill: Well, let me ask you this. Is it correct to say that science’s job is to explore the universe?
#2:Yes.
Dill: If there are five senses in the universe but we have a feeling that there is something else, wouldn’t it be a job for science to try to figure out what that was?
#2: No. No. Absolutely not.
Dill: You mean science is only supposed to…just…uh…science is based on the five senses and that’s it? Anything outside the five senses, we’re not supposed to think about? I mean that sounds like…uh…the inquisition to me. I mean why…can’t science investigate this other…thing…? Why not?
Participant#3: There’s no reason that science shouldn’t be able to investigate what we do beyond. BUT! To say it doesn’t exist because science as we know it can’t prove it is where science goes wrong. They say, “Well, we haven’t been able to prove it so therefore it must not be.”
Participant#4: No. But that’s not what science says. Science doesn’t say that. Science says, “If we can’t prove that, then we can’t make a statement about it.” They don’t say it doesn’t exist. That’s a fallacy often used by…
Participant#5 Well, Larry just said, “If science is the know all, be all, then religion doesn’t exist.
#4: No, that’s not coming from a scientific point of view at all…
#1: That’s just Larry. (general laughter)
#4: That’s Larry’s point of view. (more laughter) That’s not what science says.
Dill: It’s just me? (laughter)
#5: If science can’t scientifically prove that people have ESP, then they say, “Well, it’s a trick.”
#4: No. I don’t agree.
Dill: Now, what’s the root word for science? The word science means knowledge. It’s a translation from the Greek word “scio” or whatever. Or Latin or whatever. We’re talking about knowledge. Can’t we talk about science as knowledge about the universe?
#2: No!
Dill: Can’t we substitute a word that doesn’t have as much baggage, like you want to substitute “spirituality” which is the current buzzword instead of religion, because people don’t want to use the word “religion” now…because it has too much baggage. So can’t we substitute for “science” the word, “Truth?”
#2: No. (several other “No’s” from the group)
Dill: Is there no such thing as “Objective Truth?”
#2: No. Not when involving human beings. And that’s what we as scientists need to know.
Dill: aren’t human beings in the real world? Aren’t they objective reality?
#2: No. We do not have objective reality.
Dill: We don’t?
#2: No. We have a very subjective reality based on our own experiences and that’s what scientists need to come out and say. That this is what we observe, this is what we see based on the prejudices that we have brought into it. We can try to be as objective as possible…
Dill: If I have a subjective reality…at the University of Texas in Austin they have a tower there…it’s the famous one that the guy killed 35 people. The reason they closed that tower eventually was not because of the tower sniper but because of people jumping off the tower and the last guy that jumped off said before he jumped, “God is telling me to jump off the tower.” Now, his subjective reality was that he could fly.
#3: Well, he didn’t say that. (another emphatic “No” is heard from someone in the group)
Dill: (ignoring the objections) But there was something else going on in the universe besides his subjective reality (inaudible rumblings from the audience) and it’s called…(a chorus of voices say, “Gravity.” Much laughter)…Physics is real, as we have been learning here, haven’t we? (“yes’s” and nods). So aren’t we on a continuum here now of the search for physical reality that keeps knocking aspects of religion out of the way as we proceed?
#2: But there’s so much that we…I mean even the fact that we talk about vision and sound. We don’t see things in the infrared. There is just so much out there that’s going on that we’re just not seeing and not picking up on. I would hate to say that this is a true fact flat out, there is…I mean my friends and I used to joke, wouldn’t it be fun if gravity was arbitrary. And gravity, so far as I’m concerned at this point in my life, is arbitrary. We’ve just never seen it not work before. I mean we pretty much suspect that…we’re going in a circle around the sun…so we’re pretty much stuck here…which is good…but we still don’t know…I mean there are still areas that I’m never gonna see. I’m never gonna see infrared spectra so I don’t even want to guest mate what,,,
Dill: Yeah, but we know it’s there because we’ve developed instruments…(“indirect instrument,” someone in the group mutters)
#2: So far as we know, it’s there. It’s always been consistent; but do you really want to bet the rest of your life on that. I’m not.
Dill: Well, my time is up…so..I’ll leave you with that. We didn’t even get to art. (laughter all around)
The Physical Versus the Nonphysical Universe
One of the characteristics which all the participants in the discussion above had in common was a sense of the “physical” nature of science. All seemed to grasp quite clearly the idea that science was concerned with evaluating and measuring human sensations with an eye to learning something about the world. And I think their remarks indicate that most would likely agree with the following statement made by Robert Hazen and James Trefil in their book on scientific literacy, “Science Matters.” (Anchor Doubleday, 1991, p.2)
Science is not the only way, nor always the best way, to gain an understanding of the world in which we find ourselves. Religion and philosophy help us come to grips with the meaning of life without the need for experimentation or mathematics, while art, music, and literature provide us with a kind of aesthetic, non-quantitative knowledge. You don’t need calculus to tell you whether a symphony or a poem has meaning for you. Science complements these other ways of knowing, providing us with insights about a different aspect of the universe.
Is it just me? Or does anyone else see a problem with this quotation? How is it that scientists who are so meticulous about physical verifiability of their own claims, can be so uncritical of the claims of other intellectual disciplines? As if people in other disciplines were somehow living in different universes because they say they are? How can scientists who will not acknowledge the existence of a distant star without at least some theoretical or instrumental physical evidence, accept as anything but an unverifiable fantasy, the idea of many religious practitioners that someone is out there listening to them when they pray? If they don’t believe it, why would they operate under the assumption, as Hazen and Trefil apparently do, that such claims ought not to be examined by the rules of science, because they don’t need to be? Isn’t it much more likely (and possibly even historically verifiable) that the reason religious claims are somehow exempt from scientific investigation, is a political one? Why is it that scientists are quick to discount astrology and other politically powerless pseudo-sciences as preposterous, quick to recognize shamanism in primitive societies as, well, primitive, and yet maintain such uncritical reverence for the knowledge claims of the world’s great religions by passively collaborating int eh perpetuation of wholly unverifiable claims about gods and spirits and other universes?
I believe it is the religious drag of the pre-scientific era in the history of the human species that is at the heart of science’s uneasy place in society. And since scientists are human and need love like everybody else, they can be persuaded like anybody else to wink and look the other way when it comes to the irony of religious belief and practice. Not only is such collaboration intellectually disingenuous, it prolongs the power of archaic institutions and weakens the ability of scientists to have their work take center stage in the human project. In such a twilight zone of quasi-religiosity on the part of writers like Hazen and Trafil, is it any wonder that the public school science teachers I talked to at the Exploratorium found my theories of religious obsolescence beyond the pale.
Well, just suppose there are scientists and science educators out there who agree with me that science ought to be addressing its domain issues in a more forthright manner. In fact, many scientists do address just these issues in their writing. Darwin certainly did. Einstein did. Francis Crick, Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Weinberg do in our own time. But even these writers are apologetic about offending religious sensibilities, just as I was in the transcript above. In general science writers (and museum designers as we will see), seem to want to avoid full-scale debate about what modern science has done to religion, the way military generals talk of the importance of avoiding a land war in China. It’s a very understandably human avoidance issue. But I don’t think the argument stands up to scrutiny, that the reason scientists don’t want to talk about religion is because it occupies some sacred place in the human psyche that is outside the boundaries of scientific study. Therefore I think the most important issue in American science education today is how to talk about the conflicts between rational knowledge and religious belief. The issue is too important to leave to students to try to grapple with on their own. It seems to me that a key element in understanding how science works is understanding how and why science is not a religion. With that key element in mind I will now turn to the design of the science museum as a model for science education, both literally and figuratively. I will look first at the pedagogical theories behind Frank Oppenheimer’s design of the Exploratorium with a view to measuring his concept of scientific exhibition against the underlying social and psychological conflicts in the human mind between religious belief and the scientific method.
The Cult of a Mechanical universe in the Hands-on Science Museum
I first suspected something was wrong with the way hands-on science museums were designed before I ever got to the Exploratorium. On my way to San Francisco last summer, I had planned a two week backpacking trip into the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico. Part of the itinerary of that trip had been to spend several days attempting to reprise the discoveries of basic human survival skills like stone tool making, fire building, food gathering and astronomy that I thought ought to be a part of any good science teacher’s bag of tricks. I had in mind the development of a program that would trace human knowledge from its primitive beginnings to its modern complexity. I thought I would experiment with the first part in the wilderness and round out the second half with my experiences at the Teacher Institute at the Exploratorium. But by the time my plane arrived in El Paso, the closest airport to the Mogollon Mountain Range where I was headed, I was still recovering from a severe bout with bronchitis. So my girl friend and I decided that instead of risking my being caught in the mountains with pneumonia, we would rent a car and drive across New Mexico and Arizona to the Grand Canyon for a safer if more sedentary holiday. It was at the end of that trip, while I was holed up in El Paso awaiting my flight to San Francisco that I visited El Paso’s Insights Museum. I was so disappointed at the uninspiring design of the museum and the tired exhibits I found there that I went back to my hotel room to write an essay on how boring science museums could be when they lacked the financial resources I expected to find in San Francisco. I was naïve enough to think the issue was primarily one of funding and public support.
What I found in San Francisco was quite a different story. Flush with government and private funding, revenues from a daily horde of paying museum goers, the workshop from heaven, a library, gift shop, restaurant, internet connections, classrooms and a staff of professional science educators, all housed in a single open space three blocks long, the Exploratorium should have provided me with everything the El Paso museum could not. But it did not. The fact is, (and it took me several days to come to grips with this) the Exploratorium was just as boring to me as Insights in El Paso had been. Within a few days of my arrival in San Francisco, I realized that I was longing for something else in a science museum. Something more like a natural history museum, but with hands-on capability. Something that integrated the study of physics (which is the central theme of the Exploratorium) with the history of the study of physics, and with the study of biological evolution (which is the driving force behind the design of most of the natural history museums I had been in). Most importantly, what was missing was a story. A story in words and pictures and demonstrations of who and what we are, where we came from and what we know about our universe. What I got was a gargantuan replica of, I guess, Frank Oppenheimer’s old physics classroom at the University of Colorado. What I got was a more or less whimsical look at physics from a kind of pop artist’s perspective. What I got was bad pedagogical design compounded by a mind numbing sea of little displays you put your hands on, get the point of and yawn. Acres of bad art, disconnected science trivia and conceptual disarray.
All Physics is Science but not all Science is Physics
Now that I have alienated all my friends in both San Francisco and El Paso, let me just say that I think the problems with hands-on science museums and with science teaching in general are easily repaired if an outline of the history of ideas is used as the guiding pedagogical principle rather than the crazy salad of traditional physics demonstrations. The problem with the Exploratorium is that it makes the same logical error about itself that a lot of physics teachers make. It assumes that because the academic field of physics is the study of the most fundamental elements and relationships in the universe, the chief tool of traditional physics, the mechanical experiment, ought to be the best way to teach science. If that were true, then it would seem to follow that since mathematics is the formal language of physics, that all the explanation signs on the displays and all the museum “explainers” wandering the hall should be communicating in pure mathematical notation. That is absurd of course because you have to talk to people in a language they can understand. The error is compounded whenever physicists so narrowly define the field of science that the two words, “science” and “physics” are sometimes used interchangeably. Under this kind of extreme category error, all sorts of problems arise, not the least of which is the simultaneous disdain and patronization of so called “other ways of knowing” like art and religion. On the heals of experimental discoveries by Galileo, Newton and others, of verifiable physical laws in the universe, it was only natural for physicists to want to distance themselves from philosophers who merely “thought up” explanations for things, poets who only “imagined them,” and mystics whose ideas were “revealed” in prayer and contemplation. And because religious doctrine carried with it such political and emotional power, it is understandable that physicist would proclaim, in public at least, that what they were studying was just one itty-bitty corner of the universe which had nothing to do with these other domains.
But that was then and this is now. Too many scientifically verifiable discoveries have been made in biology, paleontology, geology, chemistry, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, neuroscience, medicine, history and sociology, to see any of these fields as fundamentally “other ways of knowing,” and it is my contention that it is the sum total of these fields and their sub fields, together with math and physics, that now constitutes precisely that domain of human knowledge which once belonged to religion and art. And since religion and art still maintain a powerful grip on the human mind, it seems to me that a science museum, whether of the Exploratorium type or the natural history type, ought to see as its pedagogical mission the explication of the scientific discoveries that have discredited the cognitive errors which lie at the heart of the pre-scientific domains.
Art for Art’s Sake?
I have been talking in general terms here, lumping religion and art together because they have so many anthropological characteristics in common, such as, for example, a far more consistent reliance on myth and metaphor than ordinary science, and a common tendency to rely on subjectivity for judgement. But at a certain point we have to separate science’s relationship to art from its relationship to religion in order to be more specific about the details of overlapping domains and shifting paradigms. I found no references to religion in Exploratorium promotional materials I reviewed. But it is interesting to read the Exploratorium’s founding genius, Frank Oppenheimer, talk about art in his essay, “Exhibit Conception and Design,” in a booklet published by the Exploratorium after his death in 1985 (“Working Prototypes,” 1986)
We have used artists in a parallel capacity to that of science teachers. Each contributes exhibits that deal with roughly the same domains of nature…Art is not included just to make things pretty, although it often does so, but primarily because artists make different kinds of discoveries about nature than do physicists or biologists. The art in the Exploratorium is therefore blended with the science as part of the overall pedagogy. These works, which derive primarily from aesthetic considerations, undoubtedly also play a crucial role in our ability to attract a universal audience. We need to do more along these lines, but we are slow in doing so because we only accept those artists whose interests mesh with the broad thematic content of the museum.
Defining art is at least as troublesome as defining religion, or for that matter, science. It seems to have many different meanings depending on the context. I sometimes tend to define it broadly enough to include all creative human endeavors which exhibit skill and purpose. By this definition, I realize, scientific exploration would qualify along side cooking, poetry and serial murder. But Frank Oppenheimer clearly had a narrower view. He was obviously talking in the passage above about traditional visual artists--painters and sculptors. Though he suggests that the artists and scientists in the Exploratorium are working in the same “domain,” he does not appear to consider himself an artist; nor does he give any indication that artists are to be considered scientists.
So what are “the different kinds of discoveries about nature” that artists make to which Oppenheimer refers? Presumably he means aesthetic discoveries. Right? A sense of the beautiful, based, according to my Random House Dictionary, on “pure emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.” Well--that is a modern definition of aesthetic, but what do you do when the words used to define a concept are scientifically confusing. I mean we now know enough about the human body to know that judgments about beauty or anything else, emotional or otherwise, are all intellectual--that is in the head as opposed to the heart. The poet and artist William Blake knew that two hundred years ago when he said that “a tear is an intellectual thing.” He was right about that. But he was fundamentally wrong about eh relationship between art and science. Blake, you may remember, was the art world’s greatest critic of newton, making fun of Newton’s ideas as hopelessly angular in a world of sea shells, waves and circles. Blake’s depiction of Newton bending over his drafting papers was satirical, but it seems to me that he was reacting (emotionally) to the usurpation by science of domains previously “handled” by poets and priests. The more you look at these domain issues, the more they look like the “turf” battles of gang lords rather than both quantitative and qualitative differences in perceptual technique in the cultural domains of science, art and religion. Imagine Frank Oppenheimer as a kind of conflicted Godfather, of some huge gaming operation, judging the artists would clearly increase the gate receipts, but unwilling to let them be in charge, or eve be involved beyond a certain level, for fear that they might try to advance a different agenda from his.
Pedagogy of the Repressed
My point here is that so long as science education, as exemplified by science centers like the Exploratorium, is dominated by the rather unscientifically evaluated emotional and, what else but, aesthetic judgments of a few well-meaning, but intellectually isolated physicists, the public perception of science and its importance in the modern world will continue to suffer. The director of the National Science Foundation, Neal Lane, wrote in “The Chronicle of Higher Education,” (December 6, 1996) that “only one American in nine believes that he or she is well informed about science and technology and only one in four understands basic scientific concepts.” He goes on to say that “What scientists need to share with the public are not rarified details, but general concepts and trends in research as well as their likely impact on society and health.” Lane makes a plea in this article for scientists to speak at Rotary Clubs and on radio talk shows. I think much more is needed than PR. What is needed is a coherent pedagogy that explains what science is. The Exploratorium’s own Paul Doherty was on the David Letterman show last year, breathing a gas so heavy that he had to hang upside down on stage to get it out of his lungs before it killed him. This was great theater and I’m all for science theater as a pedagogical device. But it has to be connected to the streams of consciousness that are already flowing in the mind. Tfield of science education is currently bathed in a campy, “science is weird” mentality that is cultivated rather than dispelled by a generation of physics teachers deliberately masquerading as magicians and clowns. This makes science fun. But in a world dominated by myth and superstition, it also inadvertently connects it in some unfortunate ways to traditional medieval alchemy, witchcraft and shamanism.
This may seem funny and harmless until you think about the fact that a whole new industry of a really weird science, New Age Physics, is on the rise in America, along with a resurgence of “Creation Science,” and lord knows what else. Carl Sagan wrote a whole book about these pseudo-sciences and their damaging effects on education. No one is safe from this anti-science repression. One of my own colleagues in Austin was told by school district officials just last summer that in writing curriculum for a course in high school biology, she was not to use the word “evolution.” This is why science cannot ignore religion. Because religion is not ignoring science.
My gag ordered colleague has nowhere to turn for help with teaching biology correctly. After an extensive investigation, the U.S. National Research Center for the Third International Mathematics and Science Study has concluded that,
There is no one at the helm of mathematics and science education in the U.S.; in truth, there is no identifiable helm. No single coherent vision of how to educate today’s children dominates U.S. educational practice in either subject, nor is there a single, commonly accepted place to turn for such visions. Our visions to the extent that they exist at all are multiple. (“A Splintered Vision: An Investigation of U.S. Science and Mathematics Education,” William H. Schmidt, et al, Michigan State University, 1996)
But I have an idea that has been cooking throughout this essay. The National Science Foundation and its private counterparts must begin to fund programs at universities and science museums that seek to confront human ignorance of science for the irrational, religion based, cultural problem that it really is. These programs must encourage interdisciplinary approaches to science teaching that include the social sciences and the history of ideas; and they must courageously examine the claims of religion in the light of modern scientific discoveries. Artists, musicians, poets and writers must be invited to participate in the conceptual modeling of human ideas that, once again, can be evaluated by their scientifically trained colleagues for their value and meaning as contributions to human knowledge. Out of this kind of genuinely scientific forum, science might find its center; and out of such a renaissance approach, science education could in turn develop some direction. I believe that an unspoken standard model of human culture exists in the scientific community that relegates traditional religious and artistic expression to a simpler time in human evolution, the way it relegates early science to such a place in history. But the unspoken must be spoken. Science must come out of the closet before reason can rule the world.
--Larry L. Dill
Austin, Texas August, 1997
Sightings:
Mystical Physics:
Has Science Found the Path to the Ultimate?
by Victor J. Stenger
Published originally in Free Inquiry, 16(3)1996
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Quantum/mystic.pdf
July, 2008 New Hope Journal
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