Teaching Science Badly – and Well

Pervez Hoodbhoy
Mar 1, 2007

A normal, intelligent and curious child – particularly if he or she is Pakistani – must think to be the most wretched of subjects at school. A few lucky exceptions aside, this is the of most. Very few will actually encounter in a manner that they enjoy and deserve.

This is sad. is taught in schools for a good enough reason – we owe the modern world to it. The prosperity or of nations, and of individuals, has become contingent upon their ability to understand and control . Take its products away, and we would be back in the dark days of our ancestors when a child at birth was more likely to die than live.

But there is another excellent reason to study . Far from being a cold and soulless collection of facts, it is delicately beautiful with principles that are amazingly simple and precise. Yet, they are also incredibly powerful and universal. Exactly the same laws explain why stars shine, the blue of the sky, the beating of the human heart, and the flight of birds. grips the and fascinates endlessly. It has certainly engaged me for most of my life and I, like most scientists, will never tire of it.

If it is so wonderful, why then do only a few students in want to become scientists? The problem is the prevalence of false notions of . This, in turn, leads to that ranges from bad to terrible, and thus to students who despise what they must study and memorize.

In contrast, a recent survey in revealed that a majority of school students see as the most glamorous and interesting to pursue. Many go on to becoming the world’s top scientists. This is a key factor in the emergence of as a major world power, in scientific as well as economic terms.

A -phobic younger generation in is bad news. This must change else we shall be stuck with low technological prowess, small potentials for future economic growth, and perpetual dependency. These are inescapable penalties for any country without a large scientifically trained workforce. It would be a terrible mistake to dismiss the term “knowledge ” as a mere cliché.

But what is it exactly that we do so wrong? And, what needs to be put right? To answer these questions needs a clear understanding of what is. We must also know how it functions, and what it . Pedagogical style and techniques will follow naturally once we properly clarify and define.

My definition: is a body of knowledge, together with a very definite way of accumulating and validating that knowledge. Note the phrase “a very definite way”. This indicates that must be distinguished from , humanities, , etc. Their definitions of acceptable knowledge, and the paths leading to it, are totally different.

has no place for subjective experiences and, instead, to distinguish between true and false it relies exclusively on logic, reason, and experiment. Hypothesis, theory, fact, observation, and experiment are at the roots of what is known as the “scientific method”.

All this sounds a bit abstract, so back to plain talk: demands proof using things that we can measure. There cannot be airy-fairy discussions of things. refuses to offer an opinion on things that are unobservable, or whose existence is impossible to verify even in principle. What you cannot see may still actually be there, but is going to be mum about it. It’s as simple as that.

Every discipline has and norms. certainly does too. Its central tenet is that one’s evidence, logic, and claims will be questioned, and that one’s experiments will be subjected to replication. Therefore a high premium is put upon skepticism and there is a deep distaste for dogmatism. Successful scientists, mathematics, and engineers are valued because of the institutionalized skepticism they imbibed during their .

With all this philosophy now behind us, we can now ask what constitutes good pedagogic content for , the style, and the mistakes that are commonly made. Most importantly we need to ask: what are good teachers actually supposed to do in class?

I. First, they should help students to simultaneously acquire scientific knowledge of the world, as well as cultivate scientific habits of mind. These are two completely different things. One is providing data and information about the physical world, the other is creating a mindset needed to properly interpret this data.

Therefore, must begin with simple things such as exploring the chemical properties of common substances, plants and animals, and systematic observations of the social behavior of humans and other animals. This requires that teachers show students to dissect, sort, count, collect, catalogue, compute, graph, and make sensible notes. Use of simple equipment like rulers, lenses, thermometers, cameras, etc. is important. Many students are fearful of using laboratory instruments and other tools. This fear is often from the lack of opportunity, but girls also suffer from the mistaken notion that boys are naturally more adept at using tools.

II. Second, good teachers must emphasize learning rather than . The two are different. Learning is a process that progresses from the concrete to the abstract as cognitive abilities slowly improve. But students first need to get acquainted with the things around them such as devices, organisms, materials, shapes, and numbers. They must observe them, collect them, handle them, describe them, become puzzled by them, ask questions about them, argue about them, and then to try to find answers to their questions. Abstractions develop after these experiences, not before.

Good starts with using tangible things. One does not need a Ph.D in cognitive studies to know that young people learn best when they deal with visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic objects. As their experience grows, they learn to understand abstract concepts, manipulate , reason logically, solve theorems, and generalize. These abilities are destroyed, or left woefully undeveloped, by rote memorization.

Parsimony is essential. A good teacher picks the most important concepts and skills and concentrates on the quality of understanding, not on the quantity of information presented. In some expensive private O- and A- level Pakistani schools lots of scientific drilling exercises are given for exam grade improvement. Even when successful, this does not necessarily create mindsets for doing good scientific work at a later stage.

Similarly, overemphasizing vocabulary can be dangerous. Understanding is the main purpose of but many teachers think that their job is to make students learn big words. This detracts from as a process and jeopardizes learning, particularly in a linguistically fractured country like ours.

III. Third, good pedagogy happens when the spirit of healthy questioning is deliberately cultivated in the classroom. The scientific mindset starts developing naturally when students encounter questions that engage their mind rather than memory.

It should therefore be normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is important to measure? How to check the correctness of measurements? What is the evidence? How to make sense out of your results? Is there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers.

Dogmatism kills . Students should therefore experience as a process for extending understanding, not as unalterable truth. Never should the teacher say X or Y is true just because that’s what the textbook says. (I grind my teeth whenever a student in my university class gives me this argument! But this is what these over-grown have inevitably become.)

Equally importantly, teachers should never portray themselves as absolute authorities whose conclusions are always correct. Of course, there has to be a delicate balance here. As a teacher, I do know more than my students and I should not hide that. Was this untrue, my salary should rightfully be stopped. But the point is that I am occasionally wrong, and do make a mistake in class now and then. This can be turned to excellent advantage, as I have often discovered.

How? In traditional societies like ours, the student is told that his teacher “tumharay baap ki tarah hai”, an autocratic and tyrannical figure whose word is the . This attitude is simply incompatible with the relative student-teacher that requires. Therefore I use the occasion provided by my mistake – if it genuinely is one – to prove that my authority is not absolute. It gives confidence to the student who points out my mistake and strengthens the spirit of scientific inquiry in my class.

It is wrong to say that requires no . It does, albeit of a certain kind. Personally, I have never seen the 60 moons of Jupiter but am willing to accept their existence on because I know that, at least in principle, someone else can do it. In general, teachers must help students achieve a delicate kind of balance between this kind of and skepticism. Teachers must also be able to explain coherently what caused the overturn of accepted scientific beliefs, and what to make out of disagreements among scientists. It is extremely important to keep an open mind and challenge when necessary.

Such open-mindedness is good not just for pedagogy, but also for changing the stultifying cultural conditions of our society. The inability to deal with, or comprehend, scientific and technological matters has steadily lead to its dangerous “loser” mentality and a lurch towards extra-scientific, magical, and hodge-podge solutions.

Examples abound. Through programs produced and popularized by scientific illiterates, a virulently anti-scientific Pakistani television culture has emerged. It bashes without knowing what it is about. Flipping through the channels, you can see programs trashing evolution, discussing strange fiery creatures in the sky, ascribing earthquakes and calamities to divine retribution, and containing laughable mish-mashes of and .

Bad in our schools and wide-spread scientific illiteracy has made the siren song of unreason ever more sonorous and attractive. In older times the idiocy of the “aamils”, pirs, and mullahs and assorted soothsayers was accepted by just the ignorant and illiterate. But today college graduates, as well as the rich and powerful, now calmly accept this as high wisdom.

Good alone can change this. The demons of superstition can only be chased away by those who have learned the correct way. But for that we may first need a major cultural and attitudinal change that permits real to be taught in our schools.