[alt=banner]
        [toolbar]


          December 1, 1997

          Science Without Scientists

           [Image]

          By PAUL R. GROSS

          [F] ALMOUTH, Mass. -- As with all things Californian,
              the public education bureaucrats there are like
          those elsewhere, only more so. These experts are
          smarter than the Trojans: no gift horses for them while
          they guard the topless towers of Ilium. And they're
          fearless, too. You can't be chicken if you refuse a
          valuable and publicly offered gift, as the state
          commission in charge of writing the new science
          standards did recently.

          The facts are as follows: California, like other
          states, is writing new standards for various subjects
          taught in the public schools. When they heard about the
          need for new science guidelines, a group of scientists,
          including three Nobel laureates in chemistry,
          volunteered to help write them, at no charge.

          Even among Nobelists, those three -- Glenn T. Seaborg,
          Dudley R. Herschbach and Henry Taube -- have admirable
          credentials in education. Dr. Seaborg, a former
          Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley,
          helped write "A Nation at Risk," the famous 1983 report
          on American schooling. Dr. Herschbach is leading a
          National Academy of Sciences program to improve the
          public understanding of science.

          Dr. Taube is a much-honored professor of chemistry at
          Stanford.

          In ordinary business or government, you'd need a whole
          extra budget to pay for such consultants. So what did
          the education nomenklatura of California do? They
          snubbed the scientists and offered a $178,000 contract
          to a group made up mostly of professional educators
          based at California State College at San Bernardino.
          The Nobelists and their colleagues are appealing the
          decision.

          Most scientists would shrug at this turn of events and
          attribute it to the same bureaucratic foolishness that
          gave us ebonics, for example.

          But that would be a mistake. The conflict is the latest
          in a long history of philosophical skirmishes between
          those in the public education establishment (including
          those in the graduate schools of education) and the
          academics who generally reside in university arts and
          sciences departments.

          There have been good arguments on both sides. American
          public education is an unprecedented social experiment
          whose burden has fallen on a growing class of mostly
          underprepared, underpaid (until recently) and
          unappreciated schoolteachers. Professors in the
          academic disciplines, always somewhat better
          compensated, have usually been quick to snipe, but not
          to offer practical help. The teachers' bureaucracies,
          gaining political clout, have responded as one would
          expect: with exclusionary rules, like those for teacher
          certification, and self-righteous isolationism.

          Thus your typical working scientist considers the
          quality of science education in the public schools to
          be dismal, a judgment for which there is solid
          evidence. At the same time, the teaching establishment
          sees the professors of arts and sciences as a group
          disdainful of educational method, people who can't be
          trusted in a school classroom. A spokesman for the San
          Bernardino group suggested that the Nobelists and their
          ilk would want to teach grade-school students the laws
          of thermodynamics, which they might memorize but surely
          not understand.

          He speaks for the education establishment, which
          believes that scientists care chiefly about facts and
          formulas. Real teachers, on the other hand, know that
          they must convey understanding to a diverse population
          of schoolchildren.

          But anybody who knows anything about how science is
          constituted, and how effectively it can be taught,
          knows that facts and formulas are a very small part of
          the whole. And anybody who examines science teaching in
          the schools knows that it has failed precisely because
          the students don't understand the fundamentals. To deny
          the next generation of students the insights of those
          who actually do science of the highest quality, and who
          have succeeded in getting students to understand it, is
          knee-jerk politics.

          You would think that the education establishment would
          not be so dismissive, given the well-known and
          depressing test results in science for American
          children compared with students in other countries.

            B ut many education professionals do not put much
          store in such tests, which assume that there are right
          and wrong answers. Instead, they believe that
          objectivity is impossible -- that there is no
          "knowledge," only "knowledges." Knowledges, they argue,
          are cultural constructs. So scientific knowledge is no
          better than any other belief system. Hence social
          forces and interactions, not "correct answers," matter
          the most in education.

          Thus Dr. Seaborg et al. can be dismissed as
          "traditionalists" fixated on correct answers. But right
          and wrong answers exist. If the education professionals
          have their way, the result will not be an enhanced
          public understanding of science, but its further
          debasement.

          Paul R. Gross, an emeritus professor of biology at the
          University of Virginia, is the co-author of "Higher
          Superstition."



           Home | Sections | Contents | Search | Forums | Help

                Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company