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Science education for everyone: why and what?

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THE NOTION THAT a liberally educated person should know some science is well accepted these days. You would have to go pretty far in American academe to find the kind of academics C. P. Snow talked about a half century ago in The Two Cultures--the ones who were proud of their ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics. What I would like to explore in this essay is not so much the "whether" of general science education, but the "why." What exactly constitutes good science education, and how can we recognize when our students have received it? Once we have answered this question, the answer to the "what" question--the actual content of the curriculum--is relatively easy to find.

Before going on, I need to make one point. There are (at least) two different kinds of things that go under the name of "science education." One involves the education of future scientists and engineers--an endeavor that is, I think, in pretty good shape (although improvements are always possible). The other involves the education of what I call "the other 98 percent"--the students who will not go on to careers in science and technology. It is this latter sort of education that I want to discuss. In particular, I want to ask what sort of education the other 98 percent should get in the sciences.

There is a long history of thought on this subject in both the United States and England. John Dewey set the stage for our current debate in 1910, when he argued that the proper goal of science education (what we would call today general education in science) was to create a "scientific habit of mind." Dewey was somewhat vague on the details of this goal, although his main motivation seemed to be social utility (what I will call the "Argument from Civics" below). By the 1930s, however, University of Wisconsin educator I. C. Davis had expanded Dewey's notion as follows:

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We can say that an individual who has a scientific attitude will (1) show a willingness to change his opinion on the basis of new evidence; (2) will search for the whole truth without prejudice; (3) will have a concept of cause and effect relationships; (4) will make a habit of basing judgment on fact; and (5) will have the ability to distinguish between fact and theory. (Davis 1935, 117)

Who can argue with that?

The problem with this sort of goal--a goal that, I suspect, the great majority of academic scientists would endorse--is that it is both completely unrealistic and totally out of line with the way science is evolving. If we have this sort of goal in mind, we will treat the purpose of general science education as being the production of students who are, in effect, miniature scientists. "If...

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