• I’m sometimes required to explain technological issues to Congressional staffers. Believe me, there’s a problem in science education in this country.
There is no single solution to the problem of illiteracy in science -or maths, history, English, geography, and many of the other skills which our society needs more of. The responsibilities are broadly shared – parents, the voting public, local school boards, the media, teachers, administrators, federal, state and logical governments, plus, of course, the students themselves. At every level teachers complain that the problem lies in earlier grades. And first-grade teachers can with justice despair of teaching children with learning deficits because of malnutrition, or no books in the home, or a culture of violence in which the leisure to think is unavailable.
I know very well from my own experience how much a child can benefit from parents who have a little learning and are able to pass it on. Even small improvements in the education, communication skills and passion for learning in one generation might work much larger improvements in the next. I think of this every time I hear a complaint that school and collegiate ‘standards’ are falling, or that a Bachelor’s degree doesn’t ‘mean’ what it once did.
Dorothy Rich, an innovative teacher from Yonkers, New York, believes that far more important than specific academic subjects is the honing of key skills which she lists as: ‘confidence, perseverance, caring, teamwork, common sense and problem-solving.’ To which I’d add sceptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder.
At the same time, children with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programmes for the ‘gifted’ are sometimes decried as ‘elitism’. Why aren’t intensive practice sessions for varsity football, baseball and basketball players and interschool competition deemed elitism? After all, only the most gifted athletes participate. There is a self-defeating double-standard at work here, nationwide.
The problems in public education in science and other subjects run so deep that it’s easy to despair and conclude that they can never be fixed. And yet, there are institutions hidden away in big cities and small towns that provide reason for hope, places that strike the spark, awaken slumbering curiosities and ignite the scientist that lives in all of us:
• The enormous metallic iron meteorite in front of you is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. Gingerly you reach out to touch it. It feels smooth and cold. The thought occurs to you that this is a piece of another world. How did it get to Earth? What happened in space to make it so beat up?
• The display shows maps of eighteenth-century London, and the spread of a horrifying cholera epidemic. People in one house got it from people in neighbouring houses. By running the wave of infection back, you can see where it started. It’s like being a detective. And when you pinpoint the origin you find it’s a place with open sewers. It occurs to you that there’s a life and death reason why modern cities have adequate sanitation. You think of all those cities and towns and villages in the world that don’t. You get to thinking maybe there’s a simpler, cheaper way to do it …
• You’re crawling through a long, utterly black tunnel. There are sudden turns, ups and downs. You go through a forest of feathery things, beady things, big solid round things. You imagine what it must be like to be blind. You think about how little we rely on our sense of touch. In the dark and the quiet, you’re alone with your thoughts. Somehow the experience is exhilarating . . .
• You examine a detailed reconstruction of a procession of priests climbing up one of the great ziggurats of Sumer, or a gorgeously painted tomb in the Valley of the Kings in ancient Egypt, or a house in ancient Rome, or a full-scale turn-of-the-century street in small town America. You think of all those civilizations, so different from yours, how if you’d been born into them you would have thought them completely natural, how you’d consider our society – if you had somehow been told of it – as weird . . .
• You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips out on to the microscope stage. You look at the projected image. The drop is full of life, strange beings swimming, crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more exotic than in any science-fiction movie . . .
• Seated in the theatre, you find yourself inside the head of an eleven-year-old boy. You look out through his eyes. You encounter his typical daily crises: bullies, authoritarian adults, crushes on girls. You hear the voice inside his head. You witness his neurological and hormonal responses to his social environment. And you get to wonder how you work on the inside . . .
• Following the simple instructions, you type in the commands. What will the Earth look like if we continue to burn coal, oil and gas, and double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? How much hotter will it be? How much polar ice will melt? How much higher will the oceans be? Why are we pouring so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? What if we put five times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Also, how could anybody know what the future^climate will be like? It gets you thinking . . .
In my childhood, I was taken to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I was transfixed by the dioramas -lifelike representations of animals and their habitats all over the world. Penguins on the dimly lit Antarctic ice; okapi in the bright African veldt; a family of gorillas, the male beating his chest, in a shaded forest glade; an American grizzly bear standing on his hind legs, ten or twelve feet tall, and staring me right in the eye. These were three-dimensional freeze-frames captured by some genie of the lamp. Did the grizzly move just then? Did the gorilla blink? Might the genie return, lift the spell and permit this gorgeous array of living things to go on with their lives as, jaws agape, I watch?
Kids have an irresistible urge to touch. Back in those days, the most commonly heard two words in museums were ‘don’t touch’. Decades ago there was almost nothing ‘hands-on’ in museums of science or natural history, not even a simulated tidal pool in which you could pick up a crab and inspect it. The closest thing to an interactive exhibit that I knew were the scales in the Hayden Planetarium, one for each planet. Weighing a mere forty pounds on Earth, there was something reassuring in the thought that if only you lived on Jupiter, you would weigh a hundred pounds. But sadly, on the Moon you would weigh only seven pounds; on the Moon it seemed you would hardly be there at all.
Today, children are encouraged to touch, to poke, to run through a branched contingency tree of questions and answers via computer, or to make funny noises and see what the sound waves look like. Even kids who don’t get everything out of the exhibit, or who don’t even get the point of the exhibit, usually extract something valuable. You go to these museums and you’re struck by the wide-eyed looks of wonder, by kids racing from exhibit to exhibit, by the triumphant smiles of discovery. They’re wildly popular. Almost as many of us go to them each year as attend professional baseball, basketball and football games combined.
These exhibits do not replace instruction in school or at home, but they awaken and excite. A great science museum inspires a child to read a book, or take a course, or return to the museum again to engage in a process of discovery – and, most important, to learn the method of scientific thinking.
Another glorious feature of many modern scientific museums is a movie theatre showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten storeys tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, the most popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. To Fly brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I’ve seen religious leaders of many denominations witness Blue Planet and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth’s environment.
Not every exhibit and science museum is exemplary. A few still are commercials for firms that have contributed money to promote their products – how an automobile engine works or the ‘cleanliness’ of one fossil fuel as compared to another. Too many museums that claim to be about science are really about technology and medicine. Too many biology exhibits are still afraid to mention the key idea of modern biology: evolution. Beings ‘develop’ or ’emerge’, but never evolve. The absence of humans from the deep fossil record is underplayed. We are shown nothing of the anatomical and DNA near-identity between humans and chimps or gorillas. Nothing is displayed on complex organic molecules in space and on other worlds, nor about experiments showing the stuff of life forming in enormous numbers in the known atmospheres of other worlds and the presumptive atmosphere of the early Earth. A notable exception: the Natural History Museum of The Smithsonian Institution once had an unforgettable exhibit on evolution. It began with two cockroaches in a modern kitchen with open cereal boxes and other food. Left alone for a few weeks, the place was crowded with cockroaches, buckets of them everywhere, competing for the little food now available, and the long-term hereditary advantage that a slightly better adapted cockroach might have over its competitors became crystal clear. Also, too, many planetaria are still devoted to picking out constellations rather than travelling to other worlds, and depicting the evolution of galaxies, stars and planets; they also have an insect-like projector always visible which robs the sky of its reality.