Among the Educationaloids/The Science of Bad Science
Finn, Chester E. Jr.
AMONG THE EDUCATIONALOIDS THE SCIENCE OF BAD SCIENCE by Chester E. Finn, Jr. O ver the last several years, there has been a nationwide alarm at how little our children know of...
...These are the folks who signed the document...
...Note the extraordinarily naive view of economics that posits only a straight line between these two models...
...Some of it is unexceptionable...
...Hence the AAAS report bends over backward to avoid suggesting that there might be any legitimate reasons for rivalries or quarrels among nations, much less battles and wars...
...Discrimination based on economically irrelevant social attitudes (for example, against minorities and women, in favor of friends and relatives) further distorts the ideal of free competition...
...Unfortunately, Project 2061, for all its funding and planning, has turned into a case study of how readily a decent impulse—once entrusted to the experts and the trendies—can yield something even worse than the status quo...
...That chapter is labelled "human society," and the rationale for including it appears to be that its intellectual substance, so to speak, comes from the social sciences...
...It is here that we find the truly appalling parts of Science for All Americans, a purée of the most banal and ideological kind of anthropology, sociology, economics, and psychology...
...In response, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) decided in 1985 to launch an education reform project...
...That is what California, for example, has done in its exemplary new social studies programs...
...Only an extremist, the AAAS wants the schools to signal, would favor either of these ways of governing society...
...There is not a word about government by consent of the governed, and practically none about human or THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 35...
...It's the sort of thing scientists do with each other...
...The main reason history and geography are slighted is that contemporary social studies consists overmuch of ethnic 'See my "The Social Studies Debacle," TAS, May 1988...
...there is a chapter on "historical perspectives," for example, that nicely summarizes in roughly chronological order ten major discoveries in the history of science, from Ptolemy through Newton, Darwin, and Einstein...
...If this were an English curriculum, we'd say they were recommending sophisticated techniques of literary analysis rather than expecting students actually to plunge into great novels, poems, plays, and stories...
...Cochaired by an MIT dean and the former chairman of Bell Labs, it consists almost entirely of prominent scientists and educators, including deans at Columbia, Michigan State, and the University of Washington, Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers, and the newly appointed undersecretary of education, Ted Sanders, then Illinois' school chief...
...Nowhere does either the word or the concept of totalitarianism appear, much less any information about what life might be like under such a regime...
...If the curriculum of Science for All Americans were established in our schools, pupils would learn of economics, for example, that "at one theoretical extreme is the purely capitalist system, which assumes that free competition produces the best allocation of resources, the greatest productivity and efficiency, and the lowest costs...
...Why not pause, then, and clear our heads about what it is precisely that we want to teach...
...But when one doesn't know anything to start with, constructing a curriculum this way is like trying to build a masonry wall with mortar alone...
...But the AAAS moves in precisely the opposite direction, urging so much social science that a school would wind up devoting even less attention to what should be the subject's solid core...
...The proper goal of curriculum reform in this field is to cast out the fluff to make room for full portions of history, geography, and civics...
...In the most recent international comparison, to cite one example, American 13-year-olds scored dead last in math and tied with Ireland and two Canadian provinces for last place in science...
...Generously funded by the Carnegie and Mellon foundations, it set itself a monumental task: to spread scientific literacy throughout the land...
...Besides, the AAAS and its benefactors had big plans for Project 2061: they could scarcely move on to phase II (pilot programs in a half dozen cities), let alone phase III (going national with the programs' results), without first specifying their educational targets...
...Yet see how the polarity of extremes is put: The desire for resolute, efficient decisionmaking— at one extreme a dictatorship— may conflict with a desire for public participation— in the extreme, a democracy in which everyone votes on everything...
...O ver the last several years, there has been a nationwide alarm at how little our children know of science, mathematics, and technology...
...The reader never encounters any suggestion that some forms of social organization might be better for people than others...
...it made a major incursion into the domain of "social studies" as well...
...Even within its ostensible area of expertise, in other words, the AAAS effort has probably worsened the problem it set out to solve...
...Sciences”—get it...
...For it wants to teach a particular lesson about international relations—wants so badly to teach it that the authors are even willing to suspend temporarily their fastidious relativism in favor of a bit of advocacy...
...At the opposite "extreme" is—you guessed it—the "purely socialist system...
...Beyond the cute chapter titles the report brims over with its authors' hostility to traditional scientific knowledge and pedagogy and their infatuation with generalizing, "problem-solving," and "thinking skills...
...Several hundred professional educators and scientists, many with lofty reputations in their own specialties, were then enlisted by the AAAS as consultants, advisers, and reviewers...
...More alarming still is what the AAAS would have youngsters learn about the nature of human society...
...The date is so distant, the AAAS evidently decided it would be a suitable target for achieving its goal...
...Did you really suppose that American education could not get worse...
...Lots of them ought to have known better...
...T he AAAS panel organized its curl ricular advice into twelve chapters, purposely avoiding the familiar—but apparently "archaic"—scientific disciplines of biology, chemistry, and geology...
...T he passionlessness of the panel's I chapter on human society is rooted in its thoroughgoing relativism...
...But the group most responsible for legitimizing and advancing the report is the 26-memChester E. Finn, Jr...
...The 132,000member organization, which has humbly dubbed itself "the world's leading general scientific society," created a special panel called the National Council on Science and Technology Education...
...Earlier this year, the first fruit of this planting was harvested, a plump volume entitled Science for All Americans that prescribed the essential elements of scientific literacy: the "knowledge, skills and attitudes all students should acquire as a consequence of their total school experience from kindergarten through high school...
...As the Washington Post perceptively noted of the AAAS report: "Experts forget what it's like actually not to know math and science already...
...If students already possessed substantial scientific knowledge, a big dose of conceptualization and interconnecting would be in order...
...There are smatterings of physics and biology, of astronomy and geology, but not enough to offer the student acquiring this form of "scientific literacy" any hope of actually being ready for a college-level course...
...We're accustomed to goofiness and leftwing ideology from the social studies crowd...
...The endeavor was named "Project 2061," referring to the year Halley's Comet is next supposed to swing by...
...Now, courtesy of the AAAS, we have pounds more from the folks who, once-upon-a-time, were termed "hard" scientists...
...Note, too, what is wrong with "pure" capitalism in the eyes of the AAAS: civil rights...
...What the report urges has much more to do with learning about science than immersing oneself in science...
...is professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University and director of the Washington-based Education Excellence Network...
...And even if the system is efficient, it tends to make some individuals very rich and some very poor...
...Now, attempting to forge a nationwide core curriculum for science, math, and technology is not in itself a bad idea...
...The education reforms undertaken thus far in these (as in other) fields have plainly accomplished little...
...Trading off national interests against global ones," the panel portentously concludes, "may turn out to be the most important social decision of all...
...Doubtless we should be grateful that this crowd has not turned to training pilots or neurosurgeons— yet...
...The closing message of the chapter is that international interdependence demands a strengthening of "worldwide social systems" and a corresponding withering of the traditional nation-state...
...Yet one searches in vain for a section that looks anything like, say, "chemistry," as that discipline is customarily understood...
...T he Project 2061 team did not exactly confine itself to the "science and math" portions of the curriculum...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 studies, current events, and "life in my neighborhood...
...Certainly there is no moral difference between them in the eyes of the panel, only another choice to be made on the basis of preference, prejudice, or whim...
...The fashion in education nowadays is to despise what the panel calls "specialized vocabulary and memorized procedures," and the AAAS project is nothing if not fashionable: it seeks to create a kind of "new science...
...The initial drafting of the 217-page document was undoubtedly the work of the project staff, a five-man team headed by a refugee from the Carter Administration...
...Fancy placing Singapore, say, onto that continuum...
...And as was true of "new math," the new science won't leave many students with the sense that they actually learned anything...
...Today's social studies curriculum already suffers from a dearth of history and geography.' That's why so many kids coming out of school haven't a clue when the Civil War was fought (much less what its consequences were) or where the Middle East is...
...ber council empanelled by the AAAS specifically for this purpose...
...q A few large corporations or unions tend to monopolize the market...
...Instead, Science for All Americans employs such winsome headings as "the nature of technology," "the living environment," "the mathematical world," and so on...
...As with other contemporary reformers of math and science education, they have allowed modernism to supplant common sense, relativism to evict judgment, and progressivism to displace experience...
...After all, if we don't know what we expect youngsters to learn, chances are they won't learn much...
...The panel's view of political systems is just as fantastic: a continuum from democracy to dictatorship...
...The concern is well warranted...
Vol. 22 • August 1989 • No. 8
