The National Science Teachers Association released a story today on the state of science education in elementary schools. It doesn’t look good.
Elementary science is a critical part of the K–12 science education system. Tragically, the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has greatly diminished the time spent on teaching science in many elementary schools. In some schools that have not attained adequate yearly progress (AYP) status, science is not taught at all, and teachers are told point blank not to teach science so they can spend more time on reading and mathematics. The good intentions of NCLB eroded the fundamental foundation for science in our K–12 education system. One of the crucial parts for a fully functioning system is missing or damaged.
I personally know some elementary school teachers and I can confirm what this story reports. There is so much mandatory stuff crammed into the school day (reading, writing, math … and required physical activity) that there is just no room for science. The teachers I’ve spoken to don’t like it, but their hands are tied.
“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic and national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1996
An interesting comment by one of the most astute men of our time:
I’ve always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, “How is it possible to believe in God?†The imperishable answer was, “I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.â€
That rhetorical bullet has everything — wit and profundity. It has more than once reminded me that skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious — indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief — how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration — near infinite — of natural impulses? Yes, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature’s molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?
The skeptics get away with fixing the odds against the believer, mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable — you see? — by the belief that there was a cause for them, always deducible. But how can one deduce the cause of Hamlet? Or of St. Matthew’s Passion? What is the cause of inspiration?
This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature. As a child, I was struck by the short story. It told of a man at a bar who boasted of his rootlessness, derisively dismissing the jingoistic patrons to his left and to his right. But later in the evening, one man speaks an animadversion on a little principality in the Balkans and is met with the clenched fist of the man without a country, who would not endure this insult to the place where he was born.
So I believe that it is as likely that there should be a man without a country, as a world without a creator.
-Bill Buckley-
How Is It Possible to Believe in God? As heard on NPR’s Morning Edition, May 23, 2005.
As a nation, we have not even begun to make the commitment necessary to compete internationally in science in our schools.
Nuck, was there any particular point you were trying to make?
We know Nuck’s pont, but even though that should have been just a link, Buckley is tolerable, though irrelevant here. If it gets worse, there’s room in the spam bucket.