The oft-cited video, Private Universe, in which graduating seniors at Harvard are unable to explain correctly the reason for the seasons has often been held up as the epitome of scientific illiteracy. Unashamed, the last student to be interviewed asked, "Who cares?" To Rustum Roy, first President of NASTS, it is only where science interacts with society that it matters. At his presentation to the Fourteenth National STS Meeting in Baltimore on 6 March, he maintained that the key to this is STS. Materials: the gateway science
by John L. Roeder
"Real" science, to "Rusty," is what we can touch and feel, and this means materials, agriculture, health, and engineering. These were the sciences in the land grant tradition, he noted, but he accuses Vannevar Bush's Science - the Endless Frontier of causing physics, chemistry, and biology ("the PCBs") to eclipse them in an "Esau maneuver" after World War II. This in turn led to the progression employed in schools that begins with "The PCBs" and leads to applied science and technology.
But this is not how science is learned or how science is done, he said. "Science repeatedly encountered in life is remembered for life," he claimed. And today's scientific progress lies in applications -- from high-temperature superconductors to medical developments. Roy's "paradigm" is that scientific progress begins with human awareness of problems, which are first addressed by applied sciences; only after this might advances in the "pure" sciences follow.
To this end, Roy would consider materials to be the gateway science in the curriculum, to be followed by agriculture, health, and engineering, with physics, chemistry, and biology relegated to elective status. In support of this he cited Robert Grundin and Paul DeHart Hurd (whose book, Inventing Science Education for the New Millennium, was reported upon in our Spring 1998 issue).
Roy would also change the way science is done in accordance with his "paradigm." We should not expect science to push technology, he said; rather marketplace-driven technology should pull science. He would also end public funding of science as we know it but rather finance it by a culture foundation carved from the $7.5 trillion of wealth that the present generation of Americans will pass on to the next.
Home Spring 99 Full Screen
The TEACHERS CLEARINGHOUSE FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY EDUCATION