January 6, 2006
Teaching—Past, Present, and Future Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:55 AM EST I think Frederick Allen and Frederic Schwarz are onto something in their observations about the explosion of knowledge and the democratization of the knowledgeable. Both phenomena, however, have corollaries. The first concerns the differences among various disciplines; the second the inequities of instruction and learning between geographical and socioeconomic groups. My limited knowledge of the state of teaching today extends only to history and literature. I am a dunce in math and science, a fact that perhaps demonstrates that teaching was not superior a generation or two ago. Another recent survey on education, this one about the state of mathematics expertise among American students, revealed that the United States placed eighth worldwide. (At least, I think that was the rating. I really must start clipping these articles.) Almost as distressing as the ranking was the fact that American students believed that they rated first. But there is another side of the coin, and that has to do with the democratization of knowledge, or perhaps the lack thereof. Yesterday I eavesdropped on a conversation between two men who appeared to be in their eighties or nineties. They began by discussing the scandal in Washington, went on to bemoan the state of the world ethically and intellectually—though wondering whether they merely believed this because they were getting old, which, I thought, showed a wonderful openness of mind—and then one began to talk about the his granddaughter’s courses in science. He, apparently, was a research scientist himself. I could not hear the details—after all, I was eavesdropping—and probably would not have understood them if I had, but he was gleeful as he recounted the work his granddaughter was doing in a high school laboratory. Perhaps American education isn’t in the fix we think, at least not in all disciplines in all places. I suspect the best schools are teaching better than ever. I suspect the best students are making strides their predecessors only dreamed of. I suspect that is especially true in the sciences. But if the good news is that the current state of scientific teaching is not as bad as we feared, the bad news, according to a 2005 letter of protest to the White House by a group of leading scientists, is that this administration’s politicization of scientific research bodes ill for America’s future. And we haven’t even begun to talk about Intelligent Design.
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