I grew up in a town in the Midwest that happened to be the world headquarters for Dow Chemical Company. We may have had a senile high school French teacher who gave the same test over and over, but our chemistry teacher had a PhD.
It would be interesting to find out how much effect our solid science programs had on kids whose parents weren’t scientists. There were plenty of them — a town full of scientists also needs hairdressers and lawyers and musicians. And because our town had more money than the average Midwestern town of its size, we had solid funding for the other things that would bring families in: parks, libraries, a good hospital.
As the child of scientists, I can’t say for sure, but I think that our schools probably had an effect on the way kids who went through them looked at the world. Frankly, if you want a natural way of looking at the world, turn to religion. It’s easy for the human brain to wrap itself around mystery, wonder, and unexplained miracles.
Less easy is to train the human brain to do the thing that it alone among animal brains can do: reason. The scientific method is based on reason. It requires you to take that mass of neural pathways created by senses, emotion, and the story of your life and force them into the straight and narrow.
An example: One of my pre-mommy jobs was teaching argumentation at Cal State Hayward (now CSU East Bay). The young people I was teaching were largely products of poorly performing California public schools. Though the class was a basic Language Arts requirement, it was fundamentally a science class: How can we take apart something we believe is true and prove that it is true?
This is a hard thing for most people to do. One student I remember in particular. He had written an essay about driving (what a California topic!). Per my instructions, he tried to state his position, then develop the reasons behind it. In his first draft, he had a section about how Asian people were bad drivers. I pointed out to him that this was a stereotype. He agreed.
So a week later he turned in his finished paper. It had much in it that was well-reasoned, but he ended with something like this: “It’s not racist of me to say that Asians are bad drivers, because my sister is adopted from Korea, and she’s a bad driver.”
Oy. That sentence is a fallacy goldmine. Why was he able to write with reason for the rest of the essay, but when it came to his sister, he was stuck in emotion and prejudice?
Science makes us take fundamental parts of our belief systems and question them. Most of us are not comfortable doing this. I know that when I question something I believe and find it biased or lacking in evidence, I get this protective feeling. I MUST justify this, my instincts tell me, because it’s something I BELIEVE.
Another example: From a teaching point of view, there was one pair of essays in the book that we were using that showed rational argumentation at its best. The essays were about evolution. One of the young women in the class found them fascinating. She was a Christian, and she told me that she wanted to write her paper about evolution and religion. I don’t remember if I told her my concern: it is very hard for deeply religious people to look at their faith rationally in the way that she had to in order to write a successful argumentative essay.
I was amazed at the result. Instead of falling back on the easy arguments on both sides, this young woman of faith wrote a well-reasoned piece that both held up as argumentation, and confirmed her belief in religion. She came to me in what was like a religious fever, so excited about her paper. She had been “born again” into the realization that it is possible to be human, to have emotions and faith, but also to use the rational abilities that she as a human had been given. I considered it a great success of mine as a teacher, but she is the one who did all the work.
Science is not easy. In college, I took a physics class with a German professor who was always getting his demonstrations wrong. “Oh, vell,” he would say. “You know vat vas supposed to happen.”
That was the human coming to terms with science. Science wants to be exact, but the world is imprecise. Our atoms work mathematically, but our societies are chaotic and freeform. Those darn wire strippers made what seemed like a simple experiment very hard.
For the county science fair, my daughter and I are just about to redo her experiment so that she can show the physical results to the judges. And if it comes out different this time?
“Oh, vell,” she can say. “You know vat vas SUPPOSED to happen!”
