What can we do to help improve science education in the US?

spendius -- I am not sure what you are talking about. Technology is taught in some high schools as the descendant of and replacement for shop classes. In fact, some schools call it introduction to engineering. It deals largely with engineering and physics problems and with the realm of materials science.

That's fancy talk pom. It's about making money. It's a business proposition. It's not disinterested. That's not science.

Copernicus didn't spend frozen nights up a tower to make any money. He hid his book. He was just fascinated. Science is as fickle as a good looker at the Officers Ball in 1820 Vienna and that's really fickle.

Scientists are mad. It's a cliche.Folk wisdom.

Don't worry, you're not alone.

ros-

Nobody minds if people can't distinguish science from technology and call the latter the former in order to flatter themselves.

It's very common.

What is a problem is when people like that start preaching it and telling the Government how to organise the education of tens of millions of children.

You might remember that I wrote-




Have you no experience of that sort of thing?How many potential scientists have been lost because there was nobody in their school good enough to nurture them as there won't ever be with teachers wages being a fraction of that of lawyers and newsreaders and suchlike.

In fact your latest contribution-



Rather proves the point. Rather than engage with the idea and allow it a mite of respect all you do is add another meaningless jibe from which one may fairly presume that if your ideas are imported into the nation's classrooms meaningless jibes will be presented as some sort of way forward which they are not.

Do you not accept the wisdom of the ages that scientists are mad? Perhaps you have never met any. Sir Frank Whittle was considered to be nuts as was Logie-Baird. The whole history of science is littered with nutcases. Dreamers.

Maybe, if you seek to influence the nation's education system, you might try finding out what I'm talking about. The last thing even a half-baked scientist would do is assume he knows what's what. The open mind is priority No1. Without that there's nothing scientific going on.

If you think that is the problem, you are taking a rather narrow view. Consider this. I posted some time that I have two master's degrees -- one in English and American literature, while the other is in Celtic Studies, which is best described as literary history -- and I was told by several posters -- either here or on abuzz (I'm not certain how long ago it was) that I am over qualified to teach high school.

My daughter who teaches French and Spanish just got a master's in curriculum development. Now, in Massachusetts, a master's is a requirement of sorts. You need an additional 30 hours academic credit within five years of graduation or you will never be permanently certified. Yet, she is finding her opportunities limited by school systems who do not wish to pay the extra money -- as well as by small minded administrators whose feathers are ruffled by the fact that she graduated from Smith.

So, perhaps, we don't have more qualified teachers because the public doesn't wish teachers to be well educated.

Why are you supporting what you admit to be cliche and folklore? That denigrates your argument.

BTW, I was married to a man with a PhD in chemistry. I live in a community where the majority employers are Harvard and MIT and know many scientists. Most are rather gentle souls.

pom and ros-

You both raise interesting points but they are also complex points. I will,however, comment on some of them.

Folklore and cliche are essentially distillations, presented poetically, of scientific observation. Not always of course.

Not all scientists are gentle souls. One might suspect the scientific integrity of a gentle soul.

I am aware that I am making a fine and pedantic distinction but if that distinction is lost sight of I think science education will suffer.

Science aims to give an account of phenomena and depends on no particular perspective and no particular observer. A formal and politically accountable educational system is charged with inculcating a particular perspective which is easy to identify in, say, North Korea but not so easy when one is within it. Hence the observer has such a perspective.

That is an ideal type never met in practice due to idiosyncratic human perception and modes of thinking which are unavoidable. Knowing that one can at least try approaching the ideal which is impossible without knowing it.

Showing students how to approach such an ideal is bound to meet with resistance from various sources and then science education is off the agenda.

One cannot be "over qualified" to teach students. To suggest so is to betray a perspective. Probably a business one.



You mean I presume that the public want cheap child minding with a veneer of respectability achieved through the too ready granting of titles and qualifications in elaborate ceremonies where the general stupidity of the graduates can be discreetly set aside as the kit is sold to the eager buyers. Dylan's Day of the Locusts springs to mind in that regard.

I suppose you both think that's a bit cynical but Bill Burroughs said that the Naked Lunch is what's on the end of your fork. When your particular perspective hides it science has flown.

Class is a factor as well and no small one. As also are geographical, traditional and economic matters.

As I said- it's complex. Anybody who has a simplified opinion on mass education isn't worth listening to.

I refer you both to The Higher Learning in America by Thorstein Veblen who, as far as I can tell, had no particular perspective on anything outside basic biological urges common to all mankind: laughing being one.

I'm afraid I don't understand American qualifications but they do seem from here to be designed to flatter as many people as can be rounded up and, of course, their proud Mums and Dads.

Spendius -- I am not ignoring you, but, I am thinking of what you wrote.

The first comment I have to make is that folklore, alas, is dying in this age of mass communication and opinions forced down our throats. I sometimes think we are being fattened for our fois gras, which will be eaten by commercial interests that grow ever larger, but that is for another thread.

I actually like folklore and am saddened by its demise. The last fragment of a sort of folklore that I remember was the way young men in the 1960s, slashed their jeans from hem to the knee and inserted triangular pieces of their old madras shirts from earlier in the decade. This practice ended with the advent of the $5 jean store.

I am actually being serious, despite the facetious manner this post is developing.

I do think that folklore and, more specifically, anecdote is the beginning of most scholarship, scientific or social, but that it is being taken from us by the tremendous manipulative forces of our society.

As for your suspicions about gentle souls lacking scientific integrity, well, how do you feel about two of those souls being Nobel Laureates?

Now, you wrote:

Science aims to give an account of phenomena and depends on no particular perspective and no particular observer.

I feel that what was taught in my science classes so many years ago was how to account for phenomena.

As for the no particular observer, well, that is the tricky part. Do you mean anyone who happens upon the phenomena or anyone who is looking for it or anyone who is learning to observe by looking?

pom wrote in a very interesting post-



I think 1 and 3 are both true. I think learning to observe phenomena by looking is a phenomena one happens across when one has been shown how to observe it by people who are not selling anything.

Like all my literary heroes have done.

If one is looking for it one is in danger of finding what one is looking for by hook or by crook. Whatever that is certainly isn't science.

Without medical science it might not be surviveable. Narcissus with a River Patrol Rescue Service and mouth to mouth die twice techniques.

If you find me at the bottom of the lake don't bother.

Drawing a conclusion before observation is the hallmark of yellow journalism.

Speaking of American Academia Anthony Burgess wrote of the Provost of Long Island University that he was

"...to me, all that an American academic administrator ought to be, for the huge desk in his office was a disguised refrigerator crammed with ice and canned beer, and he had a bookcase of false leather spines hiding scotch, bourbon, and gin."

What conclusion might one draw from that observation?

You're missing the point POM.

There is no-



It is the teaching of Evolution that is a political movement against religion.

Apart from a few eccentrics everybody is up to their ears in science and wishes it well. I read that 2/3 of American biology teachers skip evolution altogether.

What is your reason for demanding the teaching of evolution. Who cares where we come from? Isn't where we are going of greater interest and science will lead the way.

I read that article, and I agree it is pretty horrific, but I've got to admit that my expectations for Americans have been shattered so many times that I just have no respect at all for the whole lot of idiots and can't wait for them to die off.

I think perhaps the best way to educate youngsters on science is to get all the scientists together and devise a clever experiment that can be used to test some of the most fundamental laws of science. This experiment should be designed in such a way that if the laws are incorrect, the testee will be annhilated. Then we can give everyone the option of either testing out the experiment, or admitting that they believe in the friggin science. Either way the problem will be solved.

A much wimpier and more polite method would be to simply rewrite the entire attitude of the American curricula. Instead of taking the attitude that science is only needed for scientists, we might adopt the more rational viewpoint that understanding for it's own sake is actually important. Then we could design a host of introductory scientific courses in which the important concepts from science, including modern physics and astronomy and evolution etc were taught at the high school level without much analytical requirement, and furthermore make this into some kind of standard so that a high school eductation does not COUNT unless the school meets the standards.

To do that you would have to persuade people and you would be back where you started. Same two groups would line up for and against.

...and the scientists would lose that battle due to moral objections to not lie, exaggerate, or cheat

Science is in danger of losing the battle because of this insistence by half-baked scientifics on teaching evolution.

You don't argue all the time about your furniture, or I hope you don't, but you would if somebody tried taking it all away just because he felt like it or he could make money.

Actually no. Science in the UK is in danger because "Health and Safety" insists on making strange and bizarre health and safety laws and teachers are too scared to do anything for fear of being sued.

Why, my chemistry teacher complained about not being able to use 2M hydrochloric acid due to knew health and safety rules. And I agree with the right-wing nutball. 2M hydrchloric acid isn't that dangerous, so long as you don't drink it.

I've spilt some on my hand and as long as you wash it off, there's no problems.

It's the concentrated hydrchloric acid you've got to be wary about.

Hah, you think scientists spend all their time arguing trying to prove things like evolution? You couldn't be more wrong.

Scientists don't waste their time trying to prove what they already know and understand, and usually don't waste their time trying to educate the uninterested and closed minded masses -- it would be a futile effort.

It is all the ignoramuses like yourself who blindly criticize everything convenient to them, down to the very core of provable facts, that perpetuate this debate between laymen and scientists.

It's too bad, because there is no shortage of fanatics like yourself who are perfectly content to dedicate their lives to just the opposite: spreading antiquated ideas because you're all too lazy to learn the truth and too arrogant to think you might have something to learn.

This is my last comment to you on this subject and I hope that you will wisen up and mosey on over to some other less scientific forum or sub-forum where you will be more warmly recieved, because you will make no converts here.

p.s. if you want to critize someone for arguing about furniture, start with Plato

stuh-

At least I'm not bad tempered and easily wound up.

What makes you think I'm arguing about science or evolution? If you have no respect for people who have views other than your own and hope they will die off that's your affair. I do have respect for them.

I know what scientists do.



A scientist wouldn't have used the word "all" in that sentence because it is meaningless with it in and thus any conclusion drawn from it is equally meaningless.

There are plenty of scientists spending some of their time arguing about science and evolution. Both those subjects don't exist in a closed box. They exist inside a social system which both supports them and hopes to benefit from them and is heavily conditioned by a long-term continuing religious psuedomorphosis which will not soon die off.



Your use of the words "waste" and "futile" are a mere function of your impatience and arrogance. Scientists often spend their time trying to educate people most of whom are not "uninterested" and don't have "closed minds" anymore than usual.

Your 3rd paragraph is merely a bad tempered assertion. And very silly with it.

It's the same with the 4th only it's longer and sillier. You obviously don't know what "fanatic" means. And I presume by "truth" you mean what you think.

You shouldn't be on a debate forum at all. What you are looking for is a megaphone and a docile audience of stuh groupies. You are too shirty.

And Plato is dust. He's of no interest to a society like ours.