How history and philosophy in the US Science Education Standards could have promoted multidisciplinary teaching

School Science and Mathematics, Oct 1998 by Matthews, Michael R

Based on the forthcoming book, Time for Science Education (Matthews, in press), this article notes that the US National Science Education Standards advocate liberal, contextual, or cultural goals for science education, including the expectation that students will understand a certain amount of the historical and cultural significance of science. After mentioning something of the rich role played by the pendulum in the foundation of modern science, in solving the longitude problem, in establishing a universal length standard, and in allowing the creation of an accurate timekeeper, as well as the pendulum clock's function in philosophy and theology, the article draws attention to the scant treatment given the pendulum in the Standards. Opportunities are thus lost for realizing the Standards' laudable goals for US science education. Finally, it is claimed that realizing these cultural goals for science education requires more routine incorporation of the history and philosophy of science into preservice and inservice courses for science teachers.

The National Science Education Standards (National Research Council [NRC], 1996) affirm many of the aims of a liberal, or contextual, approach to science education. The Standards maintain that students should learn the following:

Science contributes to culture (p. 21).

Technology and science are closely related. A single problem has both scientific and technological aspects (p. 24).

Scientific literacy also includes understanding the nature of science, the scientific enterprise, and the role of science in society and personal life (p. 21).

Progress in science and technology can be affected by social issues and challenges (p. 199)

The Standards also state that

Effective teachers of science possess broad knowledge of all disciplines and a deep understanding of the disciplines they teach (p. 60).

Tracing the history of science can show how difficult it was for scientific innovators to break through the accepted ideas of their time to reach conclusions that we currently take for granted (p. 171).

If teachers of mathematics use scientific examples and methods, understanding in both disciplines will be enhanced (p. 218).

The Standards' endorsement of liberal, contextual, or cultural goals for science education are manifest by the inclusion of History and Nature of Science as the last of eight content standards in the document. Of this final standard, it is said,

The standards for the history and nature of science recommend the use of history in school science programs to clarify different aspects of scientific inquiry, the human aspects of science, and the role that science has played in the development of various cultures. (NRC, 1996, p. 107)

The Standards also aspire to multidisciplinary teaching and curriculum organization, saying that "curriculum will often integrate topics from different subject-matter areas.. and from different school subjects -such as science and mathematics, science and language arts, or science and history" (p. 23). In addition, the Standards state, "Multidisciplinary perspectives also increase from subject-matter standards to the standard on the history and nature of science, providing many opportunities for integrated approaches to science teaching" (p. 104).

This paper argues that the Standards lose at least one important opportunity for integrated approaches to science teaching, namely in their treatment of the pendulum and its properties. This is a specific example, but it is being highlighted because it indicates a wider problem with the implementation of the laudable liberal and multidisciplinary aspirations of the Standards: the unfortunate lack of historical and philosophical knowledge about science in the US science education community. And in turn, this deficiency will not be ameliorated unless courses in the history and philosophy of science become more routinely included in preservice or in-service programs for science teachers.

The Pendulum's Role in the Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution is clearly one of the great episodes in human history. Its scientific, philosophical, and cultural impact, initially on Europe, and subsequently on the rest of the world, has been without parallel. The core of the scientific revolution occurred in the half-century between the publication of Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1638) and Newton's Principia (1687). In this period, Newton brought to fruition what Galileo had begun. A mathematical/experimental way of interrogating Nature displaced the varied commonsensical/observational/ philosophical ways that had hitherto dominated attempts to understand and control the world. From the perspective of world history, it was a singular and contingent event. Great civilizations had existed in Europe, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas for thousands of years, yet none of them came close to producing that way of understanding the world that was characteristic of the new science of 17th-century Europe. The Galilean-Newtonian method (or GalileanNewtonian Paradigm, as it has been called) originated in physics and quickly flowed to other scientific and nonscientific fields. The new science, frequently in conjunction with colonial and commercial interests, spread rapidly from its origins in western Europe to the far reaches of the globe. The science of western Europe, became Western science, or "universal science." Of its cultural significance for Europe, the historian Herbert Butterfield (1949) has written,