Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

January 30, 2012

There's been a lot of public wailing and gnashing of teeth in recent years about how American high school students supposedly are eating the dust of their counterparts in China, Japan, Finland, Singapore, Liechtenstein, Slovenia and a whole bunch of other countries when it comes to standardized tests of science knowledge.

It's fashionable for critics of our educational system and general-purpose apocalyptic doomsayers to interpret these results as yet another sign of the collapse of American competiveness, and the impending demise of America as a world power. Personally, that seems to me to be a bit of an overreaction; this 2008 Rand Corporation study does a good job of debunking the notion of a U.S. science and technology decline, noting that our country generates nearly 40 percent of all patented inventions and 63 percent of highly cited scientific papers, and that we are keeping pace in science and technology employment with China and Europe.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the critics are right, and that that U.S. science education is the academic equivalent of Yoji "Pop" Asano's rendition of "Party in the USA" on last season's American Idol . If we really need to boost our students' science performance, it strikes me that we might want to look at using science itself to revamp and optimize the learning process. There's a growing movement among scientists and educators to promote "brain-based" education, which incorporates the latest discoveries in neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence and takes into account the subtle but significant differences in how individual students' brains are wired. Here's a 2009 Science article on the subject and also a recent article from Johns Hopkins University's New Horizons education journal.

Electronic Textbooks Change the Learning Process

I also like the late Steve Jobs' notion of getting schools to abandon print textbooks and switch to downloadable e-books. It's possible to update e-textbooks to keep them current, so that we don't have high school physics and biology students building foundations of obsolete information. They also can be designed to facilitate interactive learning, with multimedia presentations and links to deeper source material on subjects. It's also conceivable that e-textbooks could be equipped with social networking capabilities -- think a scaled-down, classroom-size version of Twitter -- that a teacher could data-mine to gauge how well students are getting specific points of the lesson. Like Jobs, I think that if you're not winning at something, sometimes the solution is to alter the game itself.

Politicians and Education Policy

But what do I know? I'm just an autodidactic blogger. Others with loftier credentials and bigger megaphones have a very -- how should I put this tactfully? -- ah, different view of how to improve science education. I'm thinking in particular of the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and current presidential candidate Rick Santorum, an adherent of the "Intelligent Design" concept, which holds that life on our planet was deliberately crafted by a supernatural creator, rather than shaped by the natural selection process that is the underpinning of evolutionary theory. As a senator, Santorum pressed to insert an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 to require schools to treat evolutionary biology as a subject of "continuing controversy." He subsequently wrote this 2002 Washington Times op-ed piece, in which he insisted that ID is "a legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes."

That brouhaha may seem as ancient to you as the fossils that Louis and Mary Leakey found in the Olduvai Gorge, but I bring it up again not just because Santorum is running for the White House, but because an influential journalist, Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews, has taken to championing Santorum's position. In this recent article, "Santorum's Good but Hated Education Idea," he argues that schools should "teach all sides of the evolution issue," and allow students to ponder whether ID is superior to evolutionary theory as the best explanation for natural phenomena. In a follow-up, "We're Smart Enough for Darwin Debate," Mathews reiterated his position, which essentially is that fostering such a debate would enable students to learn about the scientific method and how theories are developed. As Mathews writes:

I think Darwin was right, but boring. It was hard for me to become interested in classroom explanations of natural selection when I was a student. Introducing a contrary theory like intelligent design and having students discuss its differences from Darwinism would enliven the class. It would also teach the scientific method. Did Darwin follow the rules of objective scientific inquiry? Does intelligent design?

At this point, you're probably expecting me to go into a lengthy critique of ID and why it is not a scientific theory, in which an explanation is formed from observations and tested by its ability to predict new phenomena, but rather a philosophical approach akin to that used in medieval Scholasticism, in which the adherent's goal is to find a way to reconcile information with a set of unchallengeable assumptions. (The mission statement of the Discovery Institute, the most conspicuous advocate of ID, makes pretty clear that its purpose is to promote a particular religious and conservative ideology.) But I'll resist the temptation to trash ID, since this article from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences does a much better job than I ever could. I'll also refrain from dissing Matthews' and Santorum's proposition simply because it contravenes a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Edwards vs. Aguillard, which found that compelling schools to teach "creation science" (an earlier term for ID) alongside evolution violated the First Amendment's ban on state promotion of religion. Hey, even the esteemed Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who wrote the majority opinion, was capable of a bad call once in a while.

Encouraging Debate and Critical Thinking

No, instead, I'm going to raise this point. If we accept Santorum's and Mathews' argument that students should be exposed to alternatives to evolution because some people see evolution as controversial, aren't we obligated to expose students to alternatives to other things that they're taught in school as well? When school curricula include lessons about the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, shouldn't they have to present the views of the 9 /11 Truth movement, some of whose adherents argue that al-Qaida was framed and that the World Trade Center actually was destroyed by internal explosive charges planted by government cabalists? When they learn about AIDS in health class, shouldn't they also be taught the alternative denialist view that HIV doesn't cause the disease? When reading Shakespeare's works in English class, shouldn't they also be presented with the alternative theory espoused in the 1920s by the (perhaps aptly named) J. Thomas Looney, who argued that the Bard was a straw man for the real author, Edward de Vere. (This dubious premise provided the inspiration for the 2011 film Anonymous.)

Now, that sort of curricula might be sound educational policy, if your societal goal is to turn out a lot of snarky, trivia-obsessed bloggers whose brains are stuffed to bursting with the arcane detritus of civilization. But if we're trying to provide high school students who are our future scientists and engineers with the background and skills that they'll need to invent the breakthroughs of the mid-21st century, it would be a mistake to squander their limited amount of instructional time -- in Illinois, for example, it's 180 minutes a week -- on something that's clearly not even science, like ID. There's too much genuinely important information they need to cover.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below. And an aside to Jay: If you still think Darwin is boring, maybe this segment from Baba Brinkman's "Rap Guide to Evolution" on the genetic underpinnings of natural selection will change your mind.