Perhaps the grandest museum exhibit can’t be seen. It has no home: George Awad is one of the leading architectural model makers in America, specializing in skyscrapers. He is also a dedicated student of astronomy who has made a spectacular model of the Universe. Starting with a prosaic scene on Earth, and following a scheme proposed by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, he goes progressively by factors of ten to show us the whole Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way and the Universe. Every astronomical body is meticulously detailed. You can lose yourself in them. It’s one of the best tools I know of to explain the scale and nature of the Universe to children. Isaac Asimov described it as ‘the most imaginative representation of the universe that I have ever seen, or could have conceived of. I could have wandered through it for hours, seeing something new at every turn that I hadn’t observed before.’ Versions of it ought to be available throughout the country – for stirring the imagination, for inspiration and for teaching. But instead, Mr Awad cannot give this exhibit to any major science museum in the country. No one is willing to devote to it the floor space needed. As I write, it still sits forlornly, crated in storage.
The population of my town, Ithaca, New York, doubles to a grand total of about 50,000 when Cornell University and Ithaca College are in session. Ethnically diverse, surrounded by farmland, it has suffered, like so much of the northeast, the decline of its nineteenth-century manufacturing base. Half the children at Bev-erly J. Martin elementary school, which our daughter attended, live below the poverty line. Those are the kids that two volunteer science teachers, Debbie Levin and lima Levine, worried about most. It didn’t seem right that for some, the children of Cornell faculty, say, even the sky wasn’t the limit. For others there was no access to the liberating power of science education. Starting in the 1960s, they made regular trips to the school, dragging their portable library cart, laden with household chemicals and other familiar items to convey something of the magic of science. They dreamed of creating a place for kids to go, where they could get a personal, hands-on feel for science.
In 1983 Levin and Levine placed a small ad in our local paper inviting the community to discuss the idea. Fifty people showed up. From that group came the first board of directors of the Sciencenter. Within a year they secured exhibition space in the first floor of an unrented office building. When the owner found a paying tenant, the tadpoles and litmus paper were packed up again and carted off to a vacant shop.
Moves to other empty shops followed until an Ithacan named Bob Leathers, an architect world-renowned for designing innovative community-built playgrounds, drew up and donated the plans for a permanent Sciencenter. Gifts from local firms provided enough money to purchase an abandoned lot from the city and then hire an executive director, Charles Trautmann, a Cornell civil engineer. He and Leathers travelled to the annual meeting of the National Association of Homebuilders in Atlanta. Trautmann relates how they told the story ‘of a community eager to take responsibility for the education of its youth and secured donations of many key items such as windows, skylights and lumber’.
Before they could start building, some of the old pumphouse on the site had to be torn down. Members of a Cornell fraternity were enlisted. With hardhats and sledge-hammers, they demolished the place joyfully. ‘This is the kind of thing,’ they said, ‘we usually get into trouble for doing.’ In two days, they carted away 200 tons of rubble.
What followed were images straight out of an America that many of us fear has vanished. In the tradition of pioneer barnrais-ing, members of the community – bricklayers, doctors, carpenters, university professors, plumbers, farmers, the very young and the very old – all rolled up their sleeves to build the Sciencenter.
‘The continuous seven-days-a-week schedule was maintained,’ says Trautmann, ‘so that anyone would be able to help anytime. Everyone was given a job. Experienced volunteers built stairs, laid carpet and tile, and trimmed windows. Others painted, nailed and carried supplies.’ Some 2,200 townspeople donated more than 40,000 hours. Roughly ten per cent of the construction work was performed by people convicted of minor offences; they preferred to do something for the community than to sit idle in jail. Ten months later, Ithaca had the only community-built science museum in the world.
Among the seventy-five interactive exhibits emphasizing both the processes and principles of science are: the Magicam, a microscope that visitors can use to view on a colour monitor and then photograph any object at 40 times magnification; the world’s only public connection to the satellite-based National Lightning
Detection Network; a 6 x 9 ft walk-in camera; a fossil pit seeded with local shale where visitors hunt for fossils from 380 million years ago and keep their finds; an eight-foot-long boa constrictor named ‘Spot’; and a dazzling array of other experiments, computers and activities.
Levin and Levine can still be found there, full-time volunteers teaching the citizens and scientists of the future. The DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund supports and extends their dream of reaching kids who would ordinarily be denied their scientific birthright. Through the Fund’s nationwide Youth-ALIVE programme, Ithaca teenagers receive intensive mentoring to develop their science, conflict resolution and employment skills.
Levin and Levine thought science should belong to everyone. Their community agreed and made a commitment to realize that dream. In the Sciencenter’s first year, 55,000 people came from all fifty states and sixty countries. Not bad for a small town. It makes you wonder what else we could do if we worked together for a better future for our kids.
21
The Path to Freedom*
{* Written with Ann Druyan.}
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
Epictetus, Roman philosopher
and former slave, Discourses
Frederick Bailey was a slave. As a boy in Maryland in the 1820s, he had no mother or father to look after him. (‘It is a common custom,’ he later wrote, ‘to part children from their mothers . . . before the child has reached its twelfth month.’) He was one of countless millions of slave children whose realistic prospects for a hopeful life were nil.
What Bailey witnessed and experienced in his growing up marked him forever: ‘I have often been awakened at the dawn of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom [the overseer] used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood . . . From the rising till the going down of the sun he was cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field . . . He seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish barbarity.’
The slaves had drummed into them, from plantation and pulpit alike, from courthouse and statehouse, the notion that they were hereditary inferiors, that God intended them for their misery. The Holy Bible, as countless passages confirmed, condoned slavery. In these ways the ‘peculiar institution’ maintained itself despite its monstrous nature – something even its practitioners must have glimpsed.
There was a most revealing rule: slaves were to remain illiterate. In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished. ‘[To] make a contented slave,’ Bailey later wrote, ‘it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.’ This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.
So now picture Frederick Bailey in 1828 – a 10-year-old African-American child, enslaved, with no legal rights of any kind, long since torn from his mother’s arms, sold away from the tattered remnants of his extended family as if he were a calf or a pony, conveyed to an unknown household in the strange city of Baltimore, and condemned to a life of drudgery with no prospect of reprieve.
Bailey was sent to work for Capt Hugh Auld and his wife, Sophia, moving from plantation to urban bustle, from field work to housework. In this new environment, he came every day upon letters, books and people who could read. He discovered what he called ‘this mystery’ of reading: there was a connection between the letters on the page and the movement of the reader’s lips, a nearly one-to-one correlation between the black squiggles and the sounds uttered. Surreptitiously, he studied from young Tommy Auld’s Webster’s Spelling Book. He memorized the letters of the alphabet. He tried to understand the sounds they stood for. Eventually, he asked Sophia Auld to help him learn. Impressed with the intelligence and dedication of the boy, and perhaps ignorant of the prohibitions, she complied.