Science – School – Democracy
The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Carl Sagan
Astronomer Carl Sagan once recalled how little benefit he gained from his education as a primary and secondary school student. Against the backdrop of this memory, he expressed his expectations of school as a scientist and lifelong popularizer of science. Sagan essentially complained that at school he only fulfilled the role of a kind of information replicator. Even in laboratory exercises, the answers were given in advance, and there was no room for questions. His teachers did not try to stimulate his curiosity and completely overlooked his desire to understand what he was doing and what he was learning to do. No wonder, that Sagan asked schools to encourage students to explore for themselves. Memories of his school days also led him to reflect on the relationship between science and democracy: in both, he discovered corrective mechanisms that people use to test their theories about the outside world; he spoke of both as the two best – not the best possible – inventions of man and humanity; in science and democracy, Sagan counted on people who are open to new ideas and capable of skeptically examining both new developments and established truths, bold discoveries and generally accepted knowledge. Sagan did not forget to generalize the result of his thinking: scientific thinking is a key tool of democracy in times of change.
The topic is not new, it is certainly not completely clarified, and Carl Sagan is not the first, only, or last person to write about how science benefits people and how it relates to education and democracy. It is clear that science helps us see better: to know more precisely what happened in the world, how it happened, and what reasonable action can be taken in response. Science allows us to better understand where a particular change may lead and how risks can be avoided. Thanks to increasingly reliable scientific answers, we can respond to the outside world more appropriately – with a clearer idea of the nature of the problems we face. Thanks to science in particular, humanity can respond to the world in a more prepared manner and make decisions with greater confidence. In deep darkness, even a small light is enough for a person to see where not to step and make the right decision about which way to go.
Among other things, Sagan's reasoning suggests that by developing students' scientific thinking, we develop their democratic awareness – a person with developed scientific thinking can therefore be considered a citizen with a well-developed awareness of democracy, for example, democratic processes and procedures. Isn't that a paradox?
Science is included in school curricula, scientific terminology forms the basis of classroom communication at all levels of education, and scientific knowledge is used in educational documents as the content basis for teaching – the essence of schooling has been based on natural and social sciences for more than two centuries, but it still cannot be said that science in schools contributes significantly to strengthening our students' awareness of democracy as a tool that can be used to successfully solve current problems and prevent potential ones. In today's knowledge-based schools, we introduce students to the natural and social sciences, but we still do not do so in a way that would lead them to engage in the process of inquiry, to patiently discover answers to questions that they or someone else has asked. Therefore, school should not be a repository of ready-made information that is transferred from head to head without any judgment, but rather a repository of observed and real problems that can be solved through research. But how can we ensure that schools help to develop scientific thinking in children and young people more systematically? What should teaching that leads to the development of scientific thinking in students look like in concrete terms?
In his reflection, Sagan emphasizes scientific thinking, rather than science as a body of knowledge to be taught in schools. This is probably where the problem lies: although schools are formally based on scientific principles, teaching still seems to be primarily about distributing selected scientific information. It functions much less as an institution for developing the kind of thinking that scientists use when they investigate, verify, and explain things. According to Sagan, teaching should apparently be based primarily on exploring the physical world, on the immediate discovery of phenomena that we already know a lot about, but which students – newcomers to a complex world – approach as completely unknown. In such teaching, it must be expected that students will ask questions that are new even to teachers, who will often not be able to answer with the certainty they are accustomed to. Although revolutionary paradigm shifts are rare in science, it must also be expected that the knowledge that teachers bring with them from their university studies and which they consider to be indisputable truths will be illuminated by students in the classroom from unusual angles and in the perspective of current findings, which are relatively easy to obtain. It is likely that teachers – also under pressure from these situations – will more often return to the beginnings of their professional careers and the circumstances that led them to decide to study linguistics, mathematics, biology, history, or physics.
It is clear that students do not go to school to become scientific specialists. However, they should leave school with a clear understanding of three key tools of science: the concepts scientists use to think, talk, and write about their work; the methods, functional procedures, and processes that enable them to identify and predict problems more reliably, and the proven facts on which scientific consensus is based and which must be respected when seeking answers to questions related to problem solving. Students should not form this idea solely by mechanically replicating information obtained through scientific means, but rather through practical experience with the informed use of scientific tools - examining written and spoken language, mathematical solutions to real or observed problems, targeted observation and description of natural phenomena and processes, controlled analysis of school historical sources, or physical measurement and explanation. But what about concepts and facts? What role should they play in teaching that aims to develop students' scientific thinking? After all, concepts and facts have long been the strongest educational content. Should we abandon them in teaching and explore them with students without the appropriate terminology and regardless of the content of scientific consensus?
Terms such as genre, equation, photosynthesis, relativity, and reformation were created primarily to capture the essence of new knowledge that scientists are thinking about and using to carry out research methods and procedures. Thanks to these terms, knowledge about all kinds of phenomena and processes is communicated, preserved, and transmitted. On the one hand, agreement on concepts ensures the continuity of scientific knowledge, and on the other hand, it guarantees the factual accuracy of the facts that are to be taught to students. Concepts are a tool of science, but they are also its goal. Since we are best able to think about what we can name well, scientists, in addition to researching, look for words to name newly discovered phenomena and processes, use them to explain their findings, and demonstrate the validity of new knowledge. These activities could feature more regularly in teaching – on the one hand, in the practical use of existing scientific terms in learning communication, and on the other hand, in the search for new words and phrases that arise when students articulate new findings or new knowledge in their own words.
The role of facts in teaching focused on developing scientific thinking may seem even more complicated. The vast majority of facts that we consider valid were obtained as information – someone presented the information to us as a fact, and we accepted it as such – we read it somewhere or heard it from somewhere. Facts can also be the subject of original and engaging research – for example, how do history or literature students deal with the claim that Anne Frank's diary is a forgery because she could not have written with a ballpoint pen at the time? What facts is this claim based on? What do students need to find out in order to verify the validity of the facts, and thus the claim? Can they do this without traveling to Amsterdam to see for themselves that Anne's diary was written in pencil? Facts should not be distributed in schools as an end in themselves, in the sense that in school we have to learn something and therefore remember something. Rather, it should be a functional selection of information sources necessary for research and for solving problems in research tasks. This teaching material should primarily serve as a source of engaging, perhaps even adventurous discovery. With this approach to facts in teaching, it may be possible to more successfully capture the attention and curiosity of students. They will probably remember what they have learned better.
We are not actually discovering anything new. At its core, it is about developing a way of critical thinking, although it would be more accurate to speak of consistent, thorough, careful, conscientious, or even honest thinking. A person who is accustomed to thinking more consistently knows that he or she knows something. And there is much more that can be known than this person is capable of actually learning in one lifetime. One of the results of teaching focused on developing scientific thinking in students could therefore be the development of their self-critical thinking, thanks to which they will be able to deal with questions such as What do I need to know in order to think about something? Where did I go wrong? How did my opinion develop? How should I sort the facts on which my opinions are based? Which facts am I usually right about? Why do I know most about these facts or phenomena? Have I missed anything? Why did I miss it? How did this mistake affect what I think? What else can be taken into account before I accept it as fact? Is what I have been thinking for a long time still valid? How has it changed? How can I find out? How has what I have been thinking about for a long time developed? How can I find out more? Where and when can I find out? What else can I find out? Why should I examine what I think? How can I examine it?
Teaching focused on the development of scientific thinking could generally be seen as a functional overlap between informational and investigative activities – in all subjects. Thanks to this targeted transition of students between familiar information and as yet unknown knowledge, subjects can create more thoughtful space for questions that students ask when they are doing something and when they are learning to do it. In this way, we could then help students more significantly not only in creating but also in questioning their beliefs about how the world works – for example, through vivid experiences of testing assumptions and simple theories, verifying specific information and interesting hypotheses, authentically personal discovery of laws, and uncovering hidden but real connections. In this way, it should be possible to stimulate the development of a certain experiential apparatus, which can be used not only for solving educational problems at school, but also for distinguishing between real and non-existent problems and for successfully solving the problems of a society that understands democracy as one of its best inventions.
Author: Karel Dvořák, PhD.
Sources:
SAGAN, Carl. 1997. The Demon-Haunted World. Science as a Candle in the Dark. London : Headline Book Publishing. 426 p. ISBN 0-7472-5156-8
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