IS SCIENCE education in crisis? The US’s prestigious National Research Council (NRC) appears to think so. Created by the National Academies to advise the federal government, the council is calling for a major overhaul of how science is taught in America. Its new report, Taking Science to School, addresses American students’ continuing poor performance in science tests, despite 15 years of reform. In a science test given to 12th graders – 17 and 18-year-olds – in 21 industrialised countries in 1998, the US came 16th. Just 40 per cent of students grasped basic concepts such as the relationship between pressure and volume.
The NRC’s report, produced after 18 months of study, is thoughtful and thorough. The authors hope their proposals will help keep the US competitive, prepare students for high-level jobs and, equally importantly, produce citizens with enough scientific savvy to make informed decisions about issues such as stem cell research, climate change and evolution versus intelligent design (ID). But any such measures are likely to fail unless there is a fundamental change in the way science is viewed in the US – starting with the administration.
The US is not alone. The UK’s Royal Society has talked of a crisis in science education, and this autumn the British government announced an £18 million programme to encourage more young people to study science, technology, engineering and maths. Yet the US has its own unique problems. With its scientific education failing, the country has relied on large numbers of foreign-born students, scientists and engineers to maintain its momentum in research and technology. However, post-9/11 immigration restrictions have throttled back that influx of talent. According to the World Economic Forum, this was one factor behind the US’s unprecedented drop from first to sixth place in economic competitiveness last year.
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The NRC has based its proposals on the latest research about how best to teach science, exploiting children’s curiosity and observational abilities to develop explanatory and reasoning skills. It also recognises that science teachers need to know and like science, and addresses criticism that compared with other countries, including the UK, science education in the US is “a mile wide but an inch deep”. The report proposes that a few core concepts should be taught well, so that students’ knowledge and understanding deepens systematically. The authors recognise too the impact of family and culture on how children learn. All in all, it is an impressive piece of work.
However, education does not exist in a vacuum. Even if the NRC’s recommendations were widely implemented, science teaching better funded and teachers better trained, it is hard to imagine science education thriving in a nation whose leaders demonstrate an active disdain for the subject. Whether it is the current administration’s stranglehold on stem cell research, years of stonewalling the link between human activity and climate change, or the muzzling of leading researchers like James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, an anti-scientific bias at the top inevitably trickles down to the grass roots, affecting the myriad intimate interactions between teachers and students that can make or break a scientific education.
“It’s hard to see science education thriving in a nation whose leaders actively disdain science”
What conclusions are potential teachers and students likely to draw about the importance of science when scientists’ gravest warnings about human-caused climate change are dismissed by political authorities as self-serving exaggerations, and blue-pencilled out of official documents? Or when researchers like Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University are subpoenaed and grilled by Congress for presenting an “inconvenient truth” (the title of Al Gore’s recent film on the subject) about climate change? Or when those same leaders seek to have ID taught in parallel with evolution – if evolution is taught at all? As the authors of Taking Science to School point out, at the very heart of science “lies the attitude that data and evidence hold a primary position in deciding any issue”.
Unfortunately, it is precisely this point that the current US leadership appears to take issue with. Witness how, encouraged by religious and political leaders – including President Bush – parents and school board members continue to push for the teaching of ID in science classes, and how groups such as Students for Academic Freedom are agitating nationwide for laws authorising students to sue schools or teachers that don’t provide equal time for ID and other politicised topics.
The curriculum proposed by the NRC will have to be evaluated state by state, and will stir intense political battles in many of them. I applaud the council’s efforts, but I suspect that we will not see any real improvement until scientists, teachers, parents and students receive a very different message from their leaders. The NRC proposes to reform science education from the ground up. That can hardly succeed when science itself is being devalued from the top down.