Science Education and Liberal Education

Wednesday, April 15th, 2015

Matthew B. Crawford (The World Beyond Your Head) compares science education and liberal education

As a component of liberal education, science is both similar to and different from the humanities in spirit and effect. The humanities might be understood simply as a record of the best that has been thought about the human situation. Acquaintance with this record has the effect of freeing us from the present, with its necessarily partial view, and opening us up to the full range of human possibilities. Further, to enter truly into the great works of the past, or of other cultures, requires an effort to free oneself from the present and its certainties. A cultivated willingness to make that effort is perhaps the cardinal intellectual virtue. Science makes similar demands, with similarly liberal effects. In studying nature closely, we are confronted with the fallibility of common sense. In fact, heavier things do not fall faster than lighter ones. More radically, the very idea of nature stands as a rebuke to convention altogether.

Yet science surely differs from the humanities as well. Pascal famously spoke of l’esprit de finesse et l’esprit de géométrie, representing different habits of mind. What is really on offer, then, in a physics class? The math instills a taste for rigor, and through experiment one learns intellectual responsibility: facts often astonish theory and compel one to rethink one’s position, starting anew from first principles. In its subject matter as well as its method, physics ennobles the mind by directing it to the permanent order of the world. One learns, first, that the world has such an order, and that it is intelligible; that there is a mere handful of truly fundamental things, and that these can be expressed with haiku-like economy. To arrive by argument at a relation such as F=ma is to experience a genuine revelation. One can’t help but feel that there is some deep harmony between the natural world and our efforts to understand it, or understanding wouldn’t be so pleasurable. Through such pleasures one acquires the tastes of a serious person.

But science is hard. It is therefore inherently “elitist,” merely in this obvious sense: as with skateboarding, some will be demonstrably better at it than others. One can fall on one’s behind while skateboarding, and when it happens there is no interpreting away the pavement. Similarly, in a physics course there are answers in the back of the book, standing as a silent rebuke to error and confusion. This sits ill with the current educational imperative of self-esteem. It has been clear for some time that the elephant of anti-elitism has run amok in education; my purpose is to report what happens when this elephant runs into the cold, hard surface of Newton’s laws. The material covered in a physics course can’t be dumbed down ad absurdum, as can that in a history or social studies course. What is to be done, then, to make physics more “inclusive”? The author of a physics textbook has certain artificial devices available to make his subject suitably democratic-looking. He can recite the technological blessings for consumers that flow from scientific research. He can emphasize good work habits or vocational skills that may incidentally be developed by a student in the course of his studies. These efforts to popularize in a superficial way carry the implicit message that science, and intellectual life more generally, must answer to the tribunal of economic life; physics has no standing as something worthwhile for its own sake. Far from giving physics a wider appeal, I suspect this merely disheartens students. Because it treats them as though they are insensitive to intellectual pleasures, this kind of anti-elitism seems strangely … elitist. As though students are merely being prepared to assume their place as workers and consumers.

Comments

  1. Alrenous says:

    The kind of assertions that would make physics post-modern aren’t epistemically different than the kind of assertions that make university history post-modern, so it puzzles me that not only does the distinction exist, but it follows a clear gradient.

    In economics, they say X will happen, and it does not. Explaining it away works. Post-modern physics would be identical; it would say an atom smasher should make output X, when in fact you get Y. However, in this case explaining it away does not work.

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