What’s Wrong with U.S. Science Education?

We all know there are problems, yet we struggle to put a finger on the ultimate cause. I have a candidate.

SOURCE: AP/Karen Tam U.S. science education occurs in the context of an American culture that has very deep problems with science—problems that are manifested in many spheres other than the educational system, but are certainly reflected there, too.

We’ve all heard the statistics. In a prominent international comparison released in 2007-to name just one example-fourth graders and eighth graders  in the United States lagged considerably behind students in many Asian and European nations in science and math. Indeed, whenever there’s a discussion about the place of science in our society, it isn’t long before such educational “failings” come up.

Consider an episode last month on “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC. The president of Caltech, Jean-Lou Chameau, went on the air to offer his provocative theory about why the United States fares so poorly in science and math education. Our science teachers don’t tend to have science backgrounds, Chameau argued, but instead tend to be trained in general education. That’s the problem-they don’t know their subjects intimately, and so can’t excel at teaching them.

Lehrer’s callers, though—all of whom had been screened to privilege those with science education backgrounds—quickly related their own experiences and complicated this narrative. Few disagreed directly with Chameau’s point, but they added in quite a number of complicating factors.

For instance, some callers pointed out that the necessity of “teaching to the test” often constrains the ability of science teachers to more creatively engage students. Similarly, others observed that many students are afraid of science and math, fearing it’s too hard, and simply not for them. It’s something I’ve heard as well from science teachers: That many of their students insist they’re not a “science person” or a “math person.”

And that’s just the beginning. Another Brian Lehrer caller sadly remarked that we don’t pay our teachers well, whatever their training. Another noted that we live in a culture that values celebrity and money, not intellect. And Lehrer himself pointed out the religiosity of the United States, and how that can impair science education, which of course is particularly notorious on the topic of evolution.

Is it possible that all of these things are true, and all of them are the problem? I would argue that is precisely the case—and indeed, how could it be otherwise? U.S. science education occurs in the context of an American culture that has very deep problems with science—problems that are manifested in many spheres other than the educational system, but are certainly reflected there, too.

What this inevitably means is that even as we fight off the creationists, and (hopefully) invest more in paying teachers and training them, we have to push for cultural change with regard to how we think about science. And at the core of that change must be the recognition that science doesn’t have to be something weird, different, and alienating. It isn’t just brainless memorization, and it isn’t useless stuff that you’ll never need. Rather, it’s fun, and it’s relevant—or at least it can be in the hands of a good teacher. At the middle-school or high-school level, any teacher who can convey this ought to be celebrated, whether or not he or she has a science background.

Since I am a person who was actually turned on to science at a particular point during my educational trajectory, perhaps my personal history is instructive here. Nothing against my high school teachers, but while I got A’s in science, I didn’t learn much of anything in a way that made it deeply resonate for me. That’s because I viewed the whole thing as a kind of game: memorization, which I was good at. The trick works especially well in biology, where knowing all the parts of the cell, or the stages of the Krebs Cycle, are the kinds of things you’re tested on.

It was only in college, when I started reading books by people such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson that science actually took on some meaning for me. In the hands of these literary scientists, science was no longer a body of facts. Rather, it unlocked who we were, where we were going, and why it all mattered. I’m too young to have been a watcher of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series, but this is a core reason why it, too, inspired so many people to get interested in science.

There’s almost a kind of trap when it comes to teaching an intricate topic such as science. If you lose non-scientists in the weeds of the information, they’ll never see why it matters. But scientists thrive in the weeds-that’s their job. Our science teachers, then, are a critical conduit between the two groups. They may or may not have scientific backgrounds, but if they can’t trim the garden, they are bound to fail.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Tags: education, STEM Education

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