An Inconvenient Truth About Science Education
by John L. Rudolph - February 09, 2007
The teaching of global warming is emerging as a hot-button issue in U.S. schools. One district has begun to treat the subject as something akin to evolutionary biology—a subject some feel is more conjecture than scientific fact. This raises important questions about how well science education in this country has prepared the public to deal with the science behind the leading socioscientific issues of our time. More content isn’t the answer. What’s needed is greater attention to how science is actually done in all its variety.
Al Gores movie on the dangers of global warming is the talk of the town these days. From cocktail parties to blogs, discussions about the effects of the earths slowly rising temperature as presented by our almost president have captivated people of all ages and backgrounds. And whats not to captivate? The likely consequences of this profound change in the earths temperature are startling as well as unsettling. We can expect to see everything from droughts, to increased storm intensities, to dramatic inundations of key coastal areas sure to displace hundreds of thousands of people in the not too distant future. The economic and humanitarian costs to the United States and the world will be staggering.
The facts of global warming are well established (IPCC, 2001). The upward trend in temperature has been carefully tracked by climatologists and government agencies worldwide. But all this isnt new. The idea that carbon dioxide could contribute to a global rise in temperature was voiced in the United States as early as the 1930s. Scientists in the 1960s and 70s began actively exploring the phenomenon, and by 2001 they reached a consensus that humans were indeed responsible (Weart, 2003). On February 2, 2007, in Paris, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made up of scientists from over one hundred countries reconfirmed these facts in the much anticipated report Climate Change 2007. And yet for some reason controversy continues to surround this topic, especially in the United States.
The Associated Press reported recently that the school board of a Seattle suburb has restricted the showing of An Inconvenient Truth in classrooms unless its balanced with a credible, legitimate opposing view (McClure & Stiffler, 2007). This school board policy came in response to a complaint from parents who objected to what they felt was a politically biased viewpoint presented as fact. This follows on the heels of the National Science Teachers Associations (NSTA) decision to shy away from the film and its hot topic. In November 2006, the Association refused to help the films producer, Laurie David, distribute 50,000 copies of the DVD to schools nationwide. According to Ms. David, who offered the DVDs with no strings attached, the NSTA responded in an email message that active involvement with the film might place unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supportersread business interests like Exxon Mobil (David, 2005, p. B01).
What does all this tell us about the state of science education in this country? It says a great deal certainly about the cozy relationship between the nations largest science teacher professional organization and certain multinational corporations. But theres a bigger issue here. Events like these are a ringing indictment of our national efforts to teach the public about science in its most meaningful sense. Too many of our citizens simply dont understand how it is that researchers figure out whats going on in the world. Its this misunderstanding about how science is done that has been and continues to be exploited by various business and political interest groups.
The situation with global warming is a telling case in point. Given that the majority of the public hold an oversimplified view of scienceas an activity that is capable of producing verifiable knowledge by means of a carefully prescribed experimental methodits not surprising that those who seek to undermine pub