Our students live in a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. To be responsible citizens, they will need to have informed opinions on all sorts of issues, from global warming, to stem cells, to the storage of nuclear waste. We can only speculate on what issues will arise in the future, but they're sure to have a scientific or technological component. So what sort of science education will best prepare students to face that world?
For most scientists, the goal of general education in science is to turn out a miniature scientist, someone who can do, at some level, the kinds of things that professional scientists do. They would agree with Nobel Laureate Carl Weiman when he said, "We want them to think like us." Given the limited amount of class time we can devote to the sciences, this goal inevitably produces students who have, at best, a good understanding of a limited range of sciences. This sort of education prepares students for the world of Galileo—not for the world they will actually enter.
Scientific Literacy and Responsible Citizenship
Science education should have a different goal: Students should be able to comprehend the news on the day they graduate. Will they understand the news article about a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions? The one on wind and solar power? Many news items on a typical day will involve such topics; students should be able to understand these scientific issues with the same facility that they understand political, economic, and legal issues. Someone who can do this is scientifically literate.
We should, then, judge the education that students receive in science on the basis of whether students will eventually become citizens who can meaningfully participate in the kind of debate that is the core process of our democratic system. Once we adopt this goal—rather than the goal of producing miniature scientists—several important conclusions follow.
First, we see that students will need to have some understanding of a wide array of scientific topics. What you need to know to make an informed judgment about storing nuclear waste is rather different from what you need to know to make an informed judgment about stem cells. To function effectively on all issues, future citizens will need to be conversant with many more aspects of science than the standard university-level "eight hours of lab science" or a single high school biology course can cover.
Second and more important, the kinds of issues we can expect future citizens to face will not be just about science. Instead, they will be issues in which science is woven seamlessly into a rich tapestry that includes ethical, political, social, economic, and moral ideas, all of which form part of the debate. In arguing about stem cells, for example, the real issues involve things like the destruction of embryos and the legal protection due a collection of cells that may someday develop into a human being. You can't even begin this debate that gets into moral/religious territory, however, unless you know what a stem cell is. Scientific knowledge becomes a kind of entry ticket into that wider debate; you can't get into the debate without it, even though you'll need more than a scientific background once you do.
Fortunately, an inherent structure in the sciences—a kind of hierarchy—points toward an effective way of achieving scientific literacy. Think of the physical universe as being something like a spider web. Around the outside of the web are all the objects that make up our world—trees, mountains, cells, butterflies. If you start anywhere on that web and start asking questions— What is this thing? How does it work?—you begin working your way in. Along the way, you will discover unexpected connections. Think, for example, of Benjamin Franklin discovering the connection between static electricity and lightning.
Once you work your way into the center of the web, however, you find a relatively small number of laws that govern the entire universe—the conservation of energy is a good example. I call these laws the Great Ideas of Science (see sidebar). They create a kind of skeleton, a matrix of concepts that tie everything together and form the foundation of our view of the universe. They are the essential core of the way the universe works. They also constitute the framework that all students need when they leave our education system, whether that means finishing high school, university, or graduate school.
I would like every student to have a mental filing cabinet based on these great ideas. When he or she comes across a public issue involving genetic engineering, for instance, I want that student to be able to open the drawer labeled "molecular genetics" and fit the new information into a matrix of preexisting knowledge about how cells work, how information in DNA is expressed, and so on.
I don't know what scientific issues will frame political debates 20 years from now. No one 20 years ago would have imagined that we'd be talking about stem cells today, and few people were even aware of the possibility of global warming. What I do know, however, is that whatever those future issues are, they will fit into the intellectual matrix provided by these great ideas. That's simply a consequence of the way science is organized.
A New Building Code
I like to think of the great ideas of science and scientific literacy as constituting a kind of building code for education. If you want to erect a building, various codes tell you the minimum standards you must meet. For example, detailed rules stipulate how many electrical outlets have to be on each wall in your house. The code guarantees that no building will be constructed if it fails to meet a certain standard. You can exceed those standards if you want to, but you can't fall below them.
In the same way, no student should be allowed to leave the education system without acquiring the basic knowledge of the physical world incorporated in the great ideas. Only then will we be sure that students will be able to become fully participating members of our modern technological society. In the best of all possible worlds, we will turn out students who far exceed this minimal building code of knowledge. I would certainly expect more of university graduates, for example.
What follows, then, for the organization of instruction? One clear implication of the argument for scientific literacy is that students must be exposed to the whole spectrum of science, not just a part of it. Every student needs to know something about the standard triumvirate of subjects—physics, chemistry, and biology. Further, the oft-neglected earth and environmental sciences have to be included as well. These areas of study should be integrated into the regular science courses— climate change in physics or chemistry, ecology in biology, and so on.
We do not underestimate the difficulty in carrying out this task. Teachers would, first of all, require training in integrated science. The important thing at this point is to highlight the requirement that after graduation, students should be prepared to take on issues involving science.
A Word About the Scientific Method
One issue often raised in discussions of science education is the question of the proper role of something called the scientific method. All science educators are located somewhere on a continuum between those advocating the teaching of method and those advocating the teaching of content. (In case you haven't guessed, I'm located toward the content side of this continuum.)
On the basis of my own research career, which has included several changes of field—from elementary particle theory to experimental cancer therapy, for example—I can say without hesitation that knowing how to apply the scientific method in one field doesn't take you very far when you go into another. In the same way, I would argue that the quasi-mystical belief that students need to "know what scientists do" is misguided. There is, in fact, no magical scientific method, no silver bullet that, once mastered, will enable someone to easily acquire knowledge of new science. If you expect your students to understand molecular biology, you have to teach them molecular biology. You don't teach them physics and hope that this knowledge will help them understand stem cells. It won't.
The New Science
No one has really addressed one aspect of science education that we're going to have to grapple with in the near future. The fact of the matter is that science has undergone a sea change over the past 50 years because of the introduction and availability of the computer. From the time of Newton until the mid-20th century, scientific explanations involved the increasingly sophisticated use of calculus. But as sophisticated as the mathematical methods became, they were still essentially pencil-and-paper operations, which means that scientists could only deal with relatively simple systems. A calculation involving the orbits of all the planets in our solar system was beyond their power.
Computers have changed all that because they can keep track of huge numbers of factors at the same time. This means that in the past 50 years, science has progressed steadily into explaining more and more complex systems. The global circulation models that form the basis of our predictions of future climates, for example, contain literally hundreds of different factors that have to be accounted for.
For example, in a warming world, there might be less sea ice; sea ice reflects sunlight whereas water absorbs the light. Models have to deal with both the change in ice and the change in energy balance. Add in man-made and natural aerosol particles (which reflect sunlight); changes in vegetation (plants absorb light whereas bare ground reflects it); and cloud formation (high clouds reflect sunlight whereas low clouds trap heat)—and you can see the complexity. Because of this, I suspect that no single individual on the planet really understands everything that goes into these models.
Despite this, students are going to have to tackle policy issues that arise from the output of these computer models. In the same way, they will have to deal with the scientific complexity of other issues and the questions that arise. For example, is the depository at Yucca Mountain an appropriate place to put nuclear waste? If we use alternate energy generators, such as windmills, how many birds will these windmills kill?
Is there anything in the current education system that will prepare students to make judgments about this new kind of science? I don't see it. Certainly the standard cookbook experiments so beloved of advocates of teaching the scientific method aren't going to help. Given the glacial pace at which major curriculum changes are made in our current system, it's not too early for us to start thinking about how we're going to integrate this aspect of the modern, computer-dominated world into science classrooms.
It would be helpful, for example, to have computer labs in which students make different assumptions about a process like cloud formation, which is highly uncertain from a science point of view. Students could then observe how their choices affect the computer predictions that result from the set of assumptions that they plugged in. If nothing else, such exercises would rid students forever of the naive belief that if something comes from a computer, it must be true.
So what will the science education of the future look like? It will start, as it must, with introducing students to the basic laws that govern the universe. Instead of presenting these laws in a compartmentalized way—divided into physics, chemistry, and biology— teachers would get across the notion that nature presents itself to us in a seamless web, without artificial labels. A student in a physics class might study the transmission of nerve signals as well as the laws governing electrical circuits; a student in biology might learn about the process of energy flow while studying ecosystems.
It's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work!
