An Assessment: Paul DeHart Hurd's Vision of Science Education
by John L. Roeder
No one has been more thorough in monitoring the record of science education than Paul DeHart Hurd. Irma Jarcho's coverage of his talk to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) on the past century of American science education graced the front page of our Fall 1992 issue; subsequently, in Winter 1992, Jarcho reviewed Hurd's article in Theory into Practice, which charted science education all the way from Francis Bacon. Now, on the heels of publication of the National Science Education Standards and Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy, with the twenty-first century beckoning to us, Hurd has now drawn from many of his writings (beginning with his 1958 Educational Leadership article which coined the term "scientific literacy") to put forth his latest book, Inventing Science Education for the New Millennium.
As one who anticipates the evening of 31 December 1999 with no more excitement than watching an automobile odometer at 99999.9, I am normally put off by claims "for the New Millennium," but this is Paul Hurd. I had learned about his book from reading his 12 Nov 97 Education Week commentary cited in our Winter 1998 "Clearinghouse Update." In that context, this book was clearly one I felt I needed to read.
I wasn't disappointed -- but not because it was easy reading. In fact, I probably spent more time per page on each of the ninety pages in this book than any I've ever read -- delighting in quotables to jot down, then taking the time to jot them down, ponder them, and compare them with other quotables I had already written down. "What's he getting at?" was the question constantly in the back of my mind.
At the outset of his Prologue (Chapter 1), Hurd unsettled me by referring to changes in the nature of science that had accompanied changes in society. I would not understand these until later, but meanwhile I was comforted by Hurd's citation of a 1970 NSF Advisory Committee report that the purpose of science education was "to educate scientists who will be at home in society and to educate a society that will be at home in science" (p. 2).
In the next chapter ("Science Education Reform on Two Fronts") I would learn that as we had moved "from an industrial smokestack economy to a postindustrial knowledge-intensive society" (p. 9), "research in the natural sciences has become more socially driven than theory driven" (p. 5). At the same time Hurd cites his own analysis of 50 reports showing a lack of "students with higher order thinking skills and science curricula with modern social, economic, and technology dimensions" (p. 10).
Being probably one of the few who has read the multitude of recent reports concerning science education, Hurd then goes on in this chapter to distill the recommendations of these reports in 27 numbered paragraphs. He does not do this, though, without noting, from Goethe, that "it is extremely difficult to report on the opinions of others." He states this caveat wisely, too, because his "take" on two specifically-cited reports does not agree with mine. I found it an oversimplification to say that the essence of BSCS' Designing the Science Curriculum (cited on p. 3 of our Winter 1997 issue) was "that after a decade of dreams, efforts to achieve major changes in science education by the year 2000 do not seem likely" (p. 13). Later, I could not locate Hurd's assertion that A Nation at Risk "notes that all efforts to bring science education into harmony with contemporary fields of science research . . . have stalled" (p. 87).
But the accuracy of Hurd's summaries of other reports is not pertinent to the points he has to make, even though he uses these summaries to buttress his arguments. The important part of this book is the points themselves, not whether shelves of other reports agree with them.
What are the points that Hurd is trying to make? At the risk of erring in summarizing them, I shall try to list them as I see them.
1. As we have moved into a knowledge-intensive society, scientific research has shifted from being basic to what Hurd calls "strategic" -- focused on specific goals (in Chapter 4, "The Changing Image of Science").
2. Much of the knowledge needed to participate in a democracy is oriented to science and technology. (Hurd speaks of a "science and technology-oriented democracy" almost as frequently as he does of a "knowledge-intensive society").
3. All students should be educated for responsible citizenship in our "science and technology oriented democracy"/"knowledge-intensive society."
4. The knowledge useful for responsible citizenship is relevant to students' well being. Science curricula should relate science and technology to students' lives, their communities, and their future; they should develop such higher-order skills as logical reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. (Hurd refers to these as "lived curricula.")
5. Science education must meet students' social and biological needs as well as their intellectual needs. In this context Hurd advocates what he calls "social inquiry" instead of "scientific inquiry," a shift which he views as a correlate to the shift from basic to strategic research.
Although Hurd claims that "The nature of the science knowledge to be taught in a six-year program required of all students is yet to be validated and synthesized" (p. 80), he writes with special attention to middle school students (Chapter 7 is devoted to them) and gives pointed hints of what he regards as "Biology in a New Vein" (Chapter 6), which now exercises a dominance in research once held by physics. In fact, one of his own listed references suggests that middle school life science curricula have been a subject of special interest since 1969 (and about which he addressed the 1988 NASTS Meeting -- see our Winter 1988 issue, p. 6).
Seeking a science curriculum that breaks down barriers between disciplines, Hurd provides a list of "randomly selected possible themes, which seem to reflect his bias toward biology (see box). Though he acknowledges the work of the National Science Education Standards and NSTA's Pathways series for providing a framework of goals, he criticizes the Standards and Project 2061 for expressing their goals within the context of academic science rather than strategic science. And I am sure he is responding "No! no! no!" to Secretary of Education Riley's response of raised standards and more demanding courses to the disappointing performance of American twelfth graders in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (U.S. Dept. of Education Community Update, 56, 5 (Apr 98)).
Thus, with the Standards and Project 2061 engendering science education reform of greater longevity than any other in the present millennium, Hurd is not sure that they are leading us in the proper direction for the next. He is certainly one of the stronger voices arguing this way, and it remains to be seen how well he will be heard or validated.
What I find most surprising about Hurd's book is its final recommendation: a National Academy of Education. I wonder whether this is another way of gathering yet one more commission to write one more report. What is to say that it will accomplish more than all the others, much less than what Hurd would have it do? Why not instead use Hurd's criteria to develop and test science curricula? For example, I would like to know what he thinks of the new Active Physics program, most recently described in our Fall 1997 issue and based on themes considered to be relevant and of interest to high school students.
Inventing Science Education for the New Millennium (ISBN 0-8077-3671-6) was published by Teachers College Press in the "Ways of Knowing Science" series in 1997. This series also includes Joan Solomon and Glen Aikenhead's STS Education: International Perspectives on Reform, reviewed in our Spring 1995 issue.
(Editor's Note: Given an opportunity to respond to this article prior to publication, Dr. Hurd confirmed that "the five major points you have stated [as enumerated above] are accurate." He also expressed interest in examining the Active Physics materials and added that his intention of a National Academy of Education was for a "think tank," not a developer of curricula.)
Paul DeHart Hurd's "randomly selected" themes
- health
- environment
- learning/information processing
- biotechnology
- risky behavior
- biological system optimization
- decision making
- understanding others
- adapting to change
- strategic research
- life skills
- knowing oneself
- real life problem solving
- quality of life
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