A Scientific Depression

It’s interesting.  When I was in high school, there were a handful of students who were either bolder than the rest, more focused on their career after graduation than the rest, or possibly just bigger jackasses than the rest.  They would, every so often during any particular class, raise their hands and ask the question, “How will this help me in the real world?”  The answers varied from teacher to teacher, of course, and they were generally pretty valid, if sometimes a bit thin.  Looking back, though, I’m not sure if I can ever remember anybody asking that question in a science class.  Maybe it seemed obvious that what we were learning was useful.  If true, that in itself would say something, I think.  But in a way I wish somebody HAD asked the question.  And I wish the teacher would have responded with, “This stuff is important because soon you’ll be old enough to vote.”

Education in general in the United States seems to be stagnant at best, and science, with its constant change and development, quickly gets left behind in the school systems.  I went to a pretty good public school system, and I’m willing to bet that my experiences there in this regard were similar to that of most people.  We spent most of each year, every year, reviewing the material that we’d learned in years past.  Precious little time was given over to actually learning anything new.  By the time I was in the 5th grade, it seemed I was scarcely learning anything at all.  Instead I was just constantly reinforcing what I already knew.  And science, in particular, was barely taught in any way.  Sure, we had science class, but the content was simplistic even for young children.  Water freezes into ice.  Living things are made of cells.  The Earth orbits the Sun.  That was pretty much the extent of it.  We weren’t taught anything about the scientific method, or fundamental concepts like genetics, evolution theory, quantum theory, or relativity theory until at least the 7th grade, and much of it wasn’t mentioned until high school.  My freshman English teacher was the first one to introduce me, formally, to the concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics.  My ENGLISH teacher had to do this, and after years of education that didn’t include these ideas.  I’m not trying to say that quantum theory is something that’s simple to teach to a 5 year old, and I certainly am no expert in early educational techniques (or physics for that matter).  I can’t pretend to sit here and tell you that I know how to make a young child understand Mendelian genetics or cellular mitosis.

But, folks… quantum theory and relativity theory have been the fundamental, core concepts of physics since the beginning of the 20th century.   It was cutting edge science when my GRANDFATHER was in school.  Surely it deserved at least a mention somewhere along the line in my early education.  At the very least, it would have been nice to not have been taught material that was outdated a century ago.  It was pretty jarring to discover, as a teenager, that everything I’d been taught about atoms, light, and the physical nature of the universe up until that point was just flat out wrong, and furthermore that it had been known to be wrong for a long time. And it’s amazing, simply amazing, that neither genetics nor evolution were mentioned at all, whatsoever, until high school.   Modern genetics has been around since the 1950′s, and Darwin presented his famous theory in the 1850′s.  That means that my early biology training was over a hundred years out of date.  Just… just think about that for a moment.

I know curriculums vary from school to school, and from generation to generation.  Perhaps I just got a raw deal.  Maybe most other students got a better exposure to science.  Maybe it’s gotten a thousand times better since then and I just haven’t noticed.  But based on my observations of the general public, of our overall society, I don’t really think so.  I suspect that most of us, whether we’re 18 or 108, have had a similar experience to what I just described, if not worse.  Sometimes much worse.  We get taught very little science, and much of it out of date, until we hit our teenage years.  Then all of the sudden we’ve got to play catch up, and fast.  NOW we’re suddenly learning new things all the time.  We’ve been marching in place for our entire childhood, academically speaking, and without warning, we’ve got to start running.  Is it any wonder, then, that our nation is so lacking in its understanding of science?  We get so little emphasis on it, and much of that is crammed down our throats in a couple of years.  If you weren’t interested  in science to start with, that sort of treatment is likely to make you resent it.

Why am I bringing all of this up?  Because it matters, because of what I mentioned in the opening paragraph.  We vote.  Science is more and more becoming the object of political debate, and most of the time, I’m amazed that we have to have the debate at all.  So often, the debate focuses not on the ethics of a particular issue or the correct course of action, but whether, in fact, there’s an issue at all.  And time and time again, it strikes me that it comes back to education.  We have arguments over whether or not the climate is changing, and whether or not burning fossil fuels might influence that.  We debate whether or not we should teach evolution theory to our children.  We constantly display a general ignorance in the public of what science actually is, what it can and can not do, and how it’s useful.  If we had only gotten a decent understanding of fundamental science issues at an early age, we wouldn’t have to go through all of this debate.  We’d be able to look at the available science to see what’s actually happening, and then have the important debate: What do we do about it?  Instead, we have a society that’s so scientifically ignorant that we don’t even understand what it is that we have, what we might be losing, and what we stand to gain.

Now, I’m sure that some on the “other” side of the argument would claim that what I’m advocating amounts to indoctrination, that it’s teaching politics to our children.  I’d argue that nothing could be further from the case.  Instead, I suggest that it’s the other way around.  Teaching science from an early age would take the politics out of science all together.  With a stronger scientific background, as a people, we’d be better equipped to make the distinction between the two, to understand where scientific fact and theory ends and where the discussion of ethics or application begins.  There really shouldn’t even be politics in science.  Science should sometimes inform politics, not the other way around.  Even if you HATE science, and wish to end it forever, it STILL makes sense that you’d want to learn all about it.  Know thy enemy, after all.  Yet frequently it’s the folks who most adamantly deny scientific facts and ideas who are the most ignorant on the very topics they are so passionate about.  If those people actually understood what they were shouting about, if they’d gotten a decent science education, perhaps they’d actually be able to bring something to the table.  The heated argument could become an interesting conversation.  Perhaps they’d be bringing up valid points, shining a light on flaws or false assumptions underlying the topic at hand.  In other words, they could actually participate in the scientific process, which, after all, is partly a process of self-correction.  And we’d all be better off for it.

Instead, the current situation is embarrassing.  Here we are, an “enlightened” culture, and at the highest level of government, we still argue over whether or not science is important, or better yet, whether or not science itself is even valid.  We’re not enlightened.  We’re ignorant.  We’re in the dark.  We just take it for granted that the future of our nation is one of continued advancement, of ever expanding technical power and scientific know-how, but in fact, there’s nothing preventing us from a dramatic slide backwards.  An intellectual dark age is possible.  I’m not saying it’s going to happen, or that it’s even likely, but I will suggest that the seeds are there.  Among certain political circles, there’s a strong bias against not just science, but scientists themselves.  In the past decade or so, the words, “academic” and “intellectual” have become disparaging terms.  Being able to think critically has almost become a flaw in some circumstances.  We’re in a political environment where one of the candidates in our most recent presidential election was accused of being eloquent and intellectual.  These were not words of praise, but of scorn.  These were not hallmarks of a good leader, but weaknesses that the candidate was encouraged to downplay.  It’s not too hard to see a future where those attitudes take over, where science and academic pursuits are discouraged, and where we not only stagnate, but slide backwards.  Again, I’m not suggesting that this will happen.  The candidate in question won the election, despite being accused of having intelligence, and even being “pro-science”.  Hopefully this indicates that the anti-science sentiment is a political fad, not an overarching trend.

Even so, we’re still in the dark as a culture, and to resolve that, education has to be the key.  If we continue to neglect science education in our school systems, if we continue to overlook the fundamental theories of biology, physics, and chemistry, then we risk more than simply faltering on scientific issues.  The critical thinking skills and logic that are so important to science education are useful in a wide spectrum of situations, both in and out of politics.   How many wasteful political debates could be avoided if we were simply better equipped to detect false logic, to analyze problems, and to understand data?  How many problems could be dealt with more directly if people didn’t argue over whether or not there even were problems?  Back in high school, when students were asking, “How will this help me in the real world?” the best answer out of any of them came from my sophomore algebra teacher.  He smiled and said something along the lines of, “Even if you never do another algebra problem again in your whole life, the mental processes involved here, the act of learning new ways to think and approach a problem, will aid you no matter what career path you take.”  He was talking about mathematics, but he could have just as well been talking about the scientific method.  If we all could just have a minimal grasp of science, if our society could at least understand what science was and how it worked, maybe we could address our most pressing issues more effectively.  Maybe we could even agree as to what the problems actually are.  Maybe we could avoid slipping into a scientific dark age, and maybe we could learn to apply a little reason and logic to our decisions, rather than blindly following whoever could shout the loudest.  There’s talk that we need another Sputnik to shame us and spur us on in our scientific endeavors.  Maybe we don’t need to have that.  Maybe we just need more people like my algebra teacher.