Teaching science as a humanities subject

Lets have one culture, not two!

This is an edited version of a chapter in Barzun’s book Teacher in America (1944.) He was seriously concerned about a great deal of science teaching in the first two years of general studies in the American colleges.

College science teaching in the junior colleges goes on to swell the ranks of the two great classes of modern men, the single track expert and the scientific ignoramus. This makes us think about the place of science teaching in a general education.

Fortunately there is no doubt whatever about the place of the sciences: they are humanities and they belong in the college curriculum. Accordingly, they should be introduced into it as humanities, at the earliest possible moment. How? I have some tentative suggestions to make, but first I want to stress the urgent need to do better.

The worst danger of science teaching in the way it is being done at present is the creation of a large, powerful, and complacent class of college-trained uneducated men at the very heart of our industrial and political system. Possibly one of the conditions that enabled the collapse of democracy in Germany during the 1930s was the split among three groups: the technicians, the citizens, and the irresponsible rabble. This is clear if you consider the professional army caste as a group of unthinking technicians. The rabble, together with the technicians can cow the citizenry because the technicians - wedded solely to their workbench - will work for any group that hires. In the modern context translate technicians as scientists. And the mass of people – the citizens - are trained to accept the authority of experts.

Such principles will hardly give long life and happiness to a democracy. The only hope for a democratic state is to have more citizens than rabble and technicians/scientists. Hence technicians must be educated to become conscious, responsible, politically and morally active people. Otherwise they will become paid slaves in the service of some rabble, high or low.

Meanwhile our present stock of citizens must not simply gape at the wonders of science, but must understand enough of its principles to criticize and value the results.

Returning to the change of direction in science teaching, we must recognize that most students will not make science their profession. The compulsory science units for future lay citizens must be explicitly designed for them. Such a course must not play at making physicists or biologists, but must explain the principles of the physical sciences in a coherent manner.

A "survey" of all the sciences is out of the question. It would be at once superficial and be­ wildering. But an intelligent introduction to principles can be given. The assumptions that connect and that differentiate the sciences of (1) matter, (2) of living beings, and (3) of logical relation can be taught; the meaning and the grounds of great unifying theories can be explained, and significant demonstrations and experiments can be shown to and made by the students.

Out of such a course there would surely come a changed attitude on the part of teachers and indeed a change in teaching personnel. At present, side by side with wise men and ripe teachers in the sciences, one finds many highly trained and absolutely uneducated practitioners.

Many university scientists openly scorn teaching and use their appointment to boil the pot of individual research. Now a life of research is a worthy one, but no amount of worthy motive justifies false pretenses and fraudulent impersonation-in this case the pretense of imparting knowledge and the impersonation of a teacher.

All this clearly depends on teaching our easygoing, rather credulous college boys and girls what science is. If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world - then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room

The time has now come for the three-cornered duel on the campus to cease. The classics, philosophy and science are at once overlapping and complementary disciplines. Science must be taught, and historically, too, or the people will perish. Philosophy likewise must have a voice in all courses throwing light on the history of ideas. It will save philosophy as a subject and save the students from narrowmindedness. But philosophy has other obvious collegiate duties. It must read its great masterpieces with the new generation, expound ethical and metaphysical theory, help teach logic, and do liaison work with historians, scientists, and theologians.

The classics, too, must enter the dance. They hold the key to the meaning of our long journey from the cave to the laboratory.