An ongoing conversation on the future of science education based on an excerpt from Neil Postman’s book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. The main participant so far is Robert H. Dott, emeritus professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, an astute scientist, prolific geohistorian and friendly soul who shares many of my thoughts on the philosophy and fate of science. Additionally, a couple of friends, Drs. Rolf Ackermann and Michael Hart, have contributed articles and insight germane to this conversation.

The selection from Postman:

From the point of view of the ascent of humanity, the scientific enterprise is one of our most glorious achievements. Would it be an exaggeration to say that not one student in fifty knows what ‘induction’ means? Or knows what a scientific theory is? 0r a scientific model? Or knows what are the optimum conditions of a valid scientific experiment? Or has ever considered the question of what scientific truth is? In ‘The Identity of Man’ Bronowski says the following: ‘This is the paradox of imagination in science, that it has for its aim the impoverishment of imagination. By that outrageous phrase, I mean that the highest flight of scientific imagination is to weed out the proliferation of new ideas. In science, the grand view is a miserly view, and a rich model of the universe is one which is as poor as possible in hypotheses.’

Is there one student in a hundred who can make any sense out of this statement? Though the phrase ‘impoverishment of imagination’ may be outrageous, there is nothing startling or even unusual about the idea contained in this quotation. Every practicing scientist understands what Bronowski is saying. Yet it is kept a secret from our students. It should be revealed. In addition to having each course include a serious historical dimension, I would propose that every school — elementary through college — offer and require a course in the philosophy of science. Such a course should consider the language of science, the nature of scientific proof, the source of scientific hypotheses, the role of imagination, the conditions of experimentation, and especially the value of error and disproof. If I am not mistaken, many still believe that what makes a statement scientific is that it can be verified. In fact, exactly the opposite is the case: What separates scientific statements from nonscientific statements is that the former can be subjected to the test of falsifiability. What makes science possible is not our ability to recognize ‘truth’ but our ability to recognize falsehood.

Bob: Many thanks for the Postman passage. Of course I could not agree more! P. has stated the case very nicely, and certainly is correct in arguing for better education in science, which emphasizes the PROCESS of science more than just its latest results, which are always ‘subject to change without notice.’ Educators have too long deprived the general student of insight into the true excitement of science — its searching, testing, rejecting process — and drowned him/her instead in a bunch so so-called facts any one of which may disappear from our radar screen at any time that a test shows them to be false.

Maitri: What you say is very interesting because it readily applies to today’s job trend. In my early (foreign) education, we learned a lot of facts and very little application and context/relevance for those facts. I have begun to notice this in the States now. Taking that a few steps backwards, introduction to scientific material starts with “Newton discovered this” or “Einstein’s equation is” without any preface as to why and how these scientists embarked on that path and what assumptions they were armed with on that journey. In essence, in pursuit of a piece of paper that may or may not earn them a job, students now go to school to learn, and much, much less to learn how to learn. When the object of science is absorbing a collection of facts to pass a test at the level of university and the garnering of money for research at a larger ivory-tower organizational level (departments, NSF, DoE, national labs, etc.), the scientific process as a whole is cheapened and we as a collective race suffer for it. The job market will suffer, too, as little innovation is to be had in the tradition of passing on facts (or in the hoarding of knowledge, for that matter).

Again, facts. Fact is the earth was once flat as well as being at the center of our solar system. We know nothing. We can know nothing. But, we keep striving to subject our reality to Postman’s “tests of falsifiability.” That is the beauty and raison d’etre of science. Universities and teachers have shirked their responsibility if they cannot pass this on to their students. Of course, we have many different governmental and private organizations now raging about our anemic science system and how it is time to go back to first principles. Will they win? Learning how to learn. Once you know how to learn, you can take anything apart. The wonderment, the imagination, the sheer excitement in knowing that even when you have figured out something other people already know, you have still made a discovery. As Piaget once said, “To understand is to invent.” Where can we regain this energy from?

In my opinion, it’s not merely an insitutional responsibility. I think like this because my parents are classical scientists and generally inquisitive people who encouraged me to read and imbibe as much knowledge as I can, as well as hailing from a family/community that traditionally fills its time with academic pursuits. Modern parents don’t read more than pulp, and television/multimedia/gaming has taken over uncontrollably as babysitters and time-passers. A young person needs to have an enquiring mindset to be a good scientist one day and what he/she gets instead is rehashed adrenaline. I can’t let my kids grow up with all these ultimately numbing stimuli. Thoughts?

Can you recommend some good books on “the language of science, the nature of scientific proof, the source of scientific hypotheses, the role of imagination, the conditions of experimentation, and especially the value of error and disproof?” There are so many pseudo-scientific sociological books floating around out there that are full of opinions, but very little that carry much real weight. I am sure you have access to some good titles.

Bob: Here is a new book that should be just what you seek. It is Uncertain Science…Uncertain World by Henry N. Pollack (a geophysicist at the U. of Michigan). It deals, as the title reveals, with the uncertainty inherent in science and the fact that we live in an uncertain world — notwithstanding the human ‘need’ for certainty.

It dawned on me some time around the middle of my teaching career that most people have great difficulty living with ambiguity or uncertainty. They want black or white answers, order and stability — also simplicity. There are at least two illusory results of this felt need —
1) assertion of ‘truth’ by imposing ‘order’ on nature or societies even in the face of uncertainty and
2) seizing upon myths as in religions. Why do people crave an omnipotent god-figure no matter how poor the evidence for such? It is all part of the same psychological difficulty of accepting uncertainty. In geology, I think this tendency has given rise to our penchant to ‘see’ cycles everywhere in our data. Cycles are as old as humans — day/night, months, seasons, etc. and they appeal to scientists because they provide order and simplicity — whether or not they really exist. An example is the current craze to see Milankovich cycles in all sorts of alleged paleo-climatic data and in sequence stratigraphy patterns. I have long railed at the tendency, now a dogma, for claiming orderly cycles in any stratigraphic succession with alternating beds of two or more lithologies — repetition does not necessarily equate to rhythmicity (as in Milankovitch cycles)!

Here is a NY Times column that may be of interest, especially because it presents a feminine viewpoint. All of it is terribly relevant right now, but parag. 2 bears particularly upon our dialogue about education.

All Together Now
July 15, 2004
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Copyright © 2004 New York Times

Their faces long with disapproval, the anchors announced that the reason for the war had finally been uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and it was “groupthink,” not to mention “collective groupthink.” It sounds so kinky and un-American, like something that might go on in a North Korean stadium or in one of those sex clubs that Jack Ryan, the former Illinois Senate candidate, is accused of dragging his wife to. But supposedly intelligent, morally upstanding people had been indulging in it right in Langley, Va.

This is a surprise? Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it’s hard to find any thinking these days that doesn’t qualify for the prefix “group.” Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate culture prides itself on individualism, but it’s the “team player” with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone “out of step with the American people.” Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program.

This summer’s remake of the “Stepford Wives” doesn’t have anything coherent to say about gender politics: Men are the oppressors? Women are the oppressors? Or maybe just Glenn Close? But it does play to the fantasy, more widespread than I’d realized, that if you were to rip off the face of the person sitting in the next cubicle, you’d find nothing but circuit boards underneath.

I trace the current outbreak of droidlike conformity to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when groupthink became the official substitute for patriotism, and we began to run out of surfaces for affixing American flags. Bill Maher lost his job for pointing out that, whatever else they were, the 9/11 terrorists weren’t cowards, prompting Ari Fleischer to warn (though he has since backed down) that Americans “need to watch what they say.” Never mind that Sun Tzu says, somewhere in his oeuvre, that while it’s soothing to underestimate the enemy, it’s often fatal, too.

And what was that group thinking in Abu Ghraib? Yes, the accused guards seem to have been encouraged to soften up their charges for interrogation, just as the operatives at Langley were pelted with White House demands for some plausible casus belli. But the alarming thing is how few soldiers demurred, and how many got caught up in the fun of it.

Societies throughout history have recognized the hazards of groupthink and made arrangements to guard against it. The shaman, the wise woman and similar figures all represent institutionalized outlets for alternative points of view. In the European carnival tradition, a “king of fools” was permitted to mock the authorities, at least for a day or two. In some cultures, people resorted to vision quests or hallucinogens – anything to get out of the box. Because, while the capacity for groupthink is an endearing part of our legacy as social animals, it’s also a common precondition for self-destruction. One thousand coalition soldiers have died because the C.I.A. was so eager to go along with the emperor’s delusion that he was actually wearing clothes.

Instead of honoring groupthink resisters, we subject them to insult and abuse. Sgt. Samuel Provance III has been shunned by fellow soldiers since speaking out against the torture at Abu Ghraib, in addition to losing his security clearance and being faced with a possible court-martial. A fellow Abu Ghraib whistle-blower, Specialist Joseph Darby, was praised by the brass, but has had to move to an undisclosed location to avoid grass-roots retaliation.

The list goes on. Sibel Edmonds lost her job at the F.B.I. for complaining about mistranslations of terror-related documents from the Arabic. Jesselyn Radack was driven out of her post at the Justice Department for objecting to the treatment of John Walker Lindh, then harassed by John
Ashcroft’s enforcers at her next job. As Fred Alford, a political scientist who studies the fate of whistle-blowers, puts it: “We need to understand in this `land of the free and home of the brave’ that most people are scared to death. About 50 percent of all whistle-blowers lose their jobs, about half of those lose their homes, and half of those people lose their families.”

This nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

Maitri: It’s definitely soothing to understate the enemy, be it in science or the “war on terrorism.” I am not one for placating the masses. A lot of it here may have to do with trying to find an American identity. People want to know what to label themselves, and that has risen from an overly fast-paced, commercial, and materialistic way of living, as well as an honest human need for identity. This mode of operation has economic benefits, however, which prompts other long-standing cultures (India, Europe, etc.) to jump on the bandwagon of the New Economy. Ultimately, they find themselves participating in a Groupthink mode, which they didn’t even require to begin with. We haven’t figured out what to do with ourselves and have successfully exported that uncertainty abroad.

There is nothing wrong with true western laissez-faire capitalism, when your profits do not come at the expense of other people, things, cultures, and ecosystems. Somewhere between the revolutionary war and now, we lost sight of our social enlightenment and individualism. Mutual interdependence (of the enlightened variety) is much more desirable over complete independence and the opposite, today’s Groupthink. How do we get back to that? My suggestion is to go back to state and community standards for schools, instead of a federal department of education which is too removed from local needs along with its generation of mountains of bureaucracy.

txyankee: Latin Americanist decides which US govt-funded scientists may speak at conferences? From today’s Guardian Life supplement:

Bushwhacked
Ben Goldacre
Thursday July 15, 2004
The Guardian

Pointing out that the current American government is manipulative, deceitful and interventionist is hardly news: although it hadn’t occurred to naive little me that it’d started meddling in science. The Bush administration has decreed that the World Health Organisation must clear US government-funded researchers with the health and human sciences department, before they can speak at conferences.

Nice. The editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the largest US academic journal, has already criticised the ban on authors of papers on Aids going to conferences, talking about their work and sharing knowledge, just because they have ideas counter to the Bush administration.

The man who decides who can speak is William Steiger. His qualifications are a PhD in Latin American history and having George Bush Snr as godfather. He was behind the attack on WHO’s reasonable suggestion that no more than 10% of people’s energy intake should come from sugar: he said there was no supporting scientific evidence. The US has a 25% guideline. That’s a quarter of your dietary intake of energy “safely” coming from pure sugar.

It gets worse. The American “Union of Concerned Scientists” has collected the signatures of dozens of Nobel prizewinners, in protest at government interference in “independent scientific review panels”. You can read the full report at www.ucsusa.org, but it’s pretty depressing. It includes examples of the Bush administration blocking research and twisting evidence on issues as diverse as safe levels in lead poisoning, the environmental impact of mining, farming, drug abuse and patterns of infectious diseases. It’s practically impossible to research a lot of these things without being part of government infrastructure.

Funny things happen when political ideologies start interfering with science. Trofim Lysenko was the top Soviet biologist for decades: he thought natural selection was too individualistic, and spent his career growing plants really close together, in the hope they would develop collectivist tendencies. Challenge him and you were out of a job.

Governments that interfere with science, with the lies of alternative therapists, the fluff of cosmetics adverts, and childish dramatisations of science stories in the news, all contribute to the popular impression that it is nonsense concocted by boffins pursuing their own peculiar agendas.

And that’s bad.

Maitri:

Bob, I hope we can keep the dialogue going. I am almost envious of your position because you were there when science was still treated as a frontier to discover, and not a field to mine for today’s “stuff.” Or, am I wrong? Was the focus of science at your time quite the same as now? Advise.

From MSH:

Energy Department Touts Science Careers
AP/San Jose Mercury News Article
8 Jul 2004

The Department of Energy has launched a campaign to increase the number of American students interested in pursuing careers in science and engineering. The program will award scholarships at national labs for math and science teachers, and will require Energy Department’s Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories to host a total of 2,000 fifth and eighth graders for at least one day a year. Announcing the new initiative, Secretary of Energy Spenser Abrams said, “The risks of a scientifically illiterate nation in the 21st century are too great for business as usual. Right now it appears that despite our grand national lab structure, despite the lasers, accelerators, electron microscopes, experimental fusion reactors and billions of dollars in research funds, we could fail to maximize our potential … Young people are inspired to take up things like sports, music and acting. I believe it’s time we start putting our science leaders on the same footing as other celebrities.” He warned: “It is a simple fact that work will migrate to the nation with the most skilled work force. Our national security depends on having access to a work force that has highly advanced technical skills.”

Federal Program Pushes Science Education
San Jose Mercury News Article
8 July 2004

U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham this week announced the Scientists Teaching and Reaching Students program, which is intended to support and foster interest in math and science programs among the country’s middle and high school students. According to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, U.S. students, who are among the top-performing students in the world in math and science at the 4th-grade level, fall nearly to the bottom of the list by 12th grade. The new program will award scholarships for math and science teachers to study at the nation’s labs, including Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories. In addition, those labs will host 2,000 5th- and 8th-grade students for at least one day a year. For a number of years, U.S. colleges and universities have seen steadily declining numbers of students in science programs, and the effect of the new program on this trend is not clear. Countries such as India, China, and Russia currently graduate significantly more science and engineering students than the United States.