8-29-90 Science education in this country is declining. In a recent editorial, the Dallas Morning News pointed out, rightly, that there has been too much emphasis on memorizing factual information. Science teachers apparently spend much of their time teaching students when, where, and how such-and-such was discovered. I agree that this is deficient. But the editorial staff recommends the wrong thing to remedy the defect. It suggests that new teaching techniques be used. Specifically, it recommends that science teachers make use of videotaped material—not as a replacement for books, but as a supplement to them. This is absurd. The remedy for overemphasizing facts is to emphasize the scientific process, the process by which facts are discovered. Students can be taught the difference between a hypothesis on the one hand and an observation on the other. Good hypotheses withstand observational tests; bad ones do not. The problem is not that science is boring, but that it is badly taught. Students get the idea that scientists run around looking for objects of various kinds. They get no sense of the rational, methodical structure of the discipline. Of all things, do not bring television into the classroom. That will turn science into entertainment. If a teacher can’t explain the scientific method, how can a television narrator?
This is really a symptom of a larger problem in American education. High-school students are treated like glorified computers. They are stocked with data and expected to retrieve it on exams. Not much else is expected of them. I’ve long been critical of history teachers, for example, because of their overemphasis on names, dates, and places (not to mention their fixation with political and military events). History students should study historiography, or the doing of history; foreign-language students should speak the language rather than spending their time conjugating verbs and parsing sentences; English students should write instead of learning how to spell and memorizing the rules of syntax. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not opposed to memorization per se. Memorization of factual matter is necessary, but not sufficient, for learning in every discipline. If I could change one thing about high-school education, it would be to replace the emphasis on facts with an emphasis on process. Students should study processes, systems, methods, and styles of criticism. They should be made to think, not just remember.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 