Volume 11 Science for
All
After a decade of stagnation,
science education in many countries is seeing renewed interest and
nationally supported curriculum efforts. In 1983 new funds in the
U.S. initiated a number of projects. In Britain, the first major
project since the '60s, the Secondary Science Curriculum Review, was
established in 1982. Even earlier, New Zealand set up a Learning in
Science Project in 1979 and, in 1982, a corresponding elementary
school project. This new activity extends beyond developed or
industrialized countries. In 1984 the Asia region of UNESCO, which
ranges from Iran to Japan, endorsed a science education program as
one of its few priorities for the rest of the 80s.
In both rehetoric and rationale, these programs share in common a strong emphasis on Science for All. This slogan is a compelling and attractive one in societies where applied science and technology are evident in new products and new forms of communications. New jobs emerge and old, familiar ones disappear. There is a cry for new skills and expertise and a chronic toll of unemployed persons who lack technical skills.
This sort of analysis of the curriculum movement of the 60s and 70s and hence of the present state of science in our schools can be used to begin to define characteristics that may be essential if science education is to be effective as Science for All and other characteristics that are at least worth trying.
First elite or traditional science education must be confined to and contained within an upper level of schooling. It needs to be identified for what it is: a form of vocational preparation. Containment is not achieved by offering alternatives at the levels of schooling where Science for All is to be achieved. It is no good having a proper science for the few and science for the rest.
Second, science must be reexamined and recognized as a variegated source of human knowledge and endeavor. A wider range of appropriate aspects of science needs to be selected for converting into the pedagogical forms of a science curriculum that will have a chance of contributing to effective learning for the great majority of students.
I have argued that present science curriculums are really an induction into science. The ones that might provide Science for All must involve much more learning about and from science.
These curriculum processes are quite fundamentally different. For instance, in the first we use teachers who have themselves been inducted into an acquaintance with some of the basic conceptual knowledge of an area of science to repeat the first steps of this process with their students. Since the teachers usually have little experience of the exciting practical applications of their knowledge or of the process of trying to extend the knowledge of a science, the induction they offer into the corpus of science is through the same abstract route they followed a s part of a former elite who could tolerate it and cope with its---learning. Few of their students are interested enough to follow.
In the alternative that I envisage for Science for All, students would stay firmly rooted outside the corpus in their society with its myriad examples of technology and its possibilities for science education. Science teachers as persons with some familiarity and confidence with the corpus of science, will need to be helped to be not inductors but couriers between the rich corpus and their students in society.
Third, some clear criteria must be established for selecting the science that is to be the learning of worth....
Such criteria should include for example, (1) aspects of science that students will very likely use in a relatively short time in their daily lives outside of school; and (2) aspects of natural phenomena that exemplify easily and well to the students the excitement, novelty, and power of scientific knowledge and explanation.
At a recent international curriculum workshop in Cyprus these two criteria were used to spell out a skeletal content for a quite new sort of science curriculum. They were found to be logically applicable in a range of broad topic areas such as senses and measurement; the human body; health, nutrition, and sanitation; food; ecology; resources; population; pollution; and use of energy.
A fundamental difference between the sort of science education (and hence curriculums) that we have had hitherto, and what may be needed for a genuine Science for All is the fact that the "All" must be thought of as existing outside of science. In other words, science is an institutionalized part of all our societies in very definite and varied ways. On the other hand, even in the most highly technical, scientifically advanced societies no more than 20 percent of the population could be even remotely identified with the institutionalized part. The remaining 80 percent are, and for their lives will be, outside of science in this sense.
It is this sense of "outside of science" that I think we must understand and translate into curriculum terms if Science for All is to succeed from our present opportunities.