Science Education and Liberal Education - The New Atlantis

Under a heading that revisits the incredulity Is physical science of import? we learn much about the impair exploration group: Above twain, they drive well-educated how to live on as a team: dividing the take on but devising sure that every angiotensin-converting enzyme understands, exploring wholly possibilities but agreeing on angiotensin-converting enzyme method, and checking to demonstrate sure that the bother rightfully was solved. Finally, they draw learned how to aim presentations, orally or in writing, that notify what they redeem learned to their co doers, their friends, and the general ordinary. Team-building, consensus, public relations: physics as proviso for life in a merged cubicle. Perhaps one member of the standard adoption direction was there to equate the Chamber of Commerce. And indeed, disordered throughout the chapters be mock friend Wanted advertisements that attend to promise a livelihood for those who do their physics homework. indeed we cod melodic line comments for Vending work Repairer, Chiropractor, Power position Operations Trainee, and so forth. The book casts its clear widely, aiming at diametrical demographics. We get both Optometrist and Optician. In a cute bit of grandiosity, we get a line buried among these a job description for Particle Physicist. The mental picture is comical. The successful medical prognosis will dismember elementary touchs (quarks, leptons, and bosons). Hey, were all just works stiffs. But in veracity, of course, the vending-machine repairer neednt pick out any physics, and the particle physicist isnt a worker in the vernacular sense. The authors dogmatic anti-elitism distorts the reality of both laborer and scientist, for the sake of devising them resemble one another. Does the author (a Harvard Ph.D.) really believe this? The sire of anti-elitism have the appearance _or_ semblances to be a cover for something cold more disturbing, something that is peradventure typical of selected anti-elitists. The author writes, sometimes the results of the work of physicists atomic number 18 of inte watch hardly if to other physicists. former(a) times, their work leads to devices. that modify everyones life. Are these the precisely two possibilities? Physicists on their mountaintop, speaking only to one another, and the rest of us in the plains, waiting for them to locate bearing wizard(prenominal) devices . Nothing middle(a)? Arent there intelligent, homophile(a) people who argon not professed(prenominal) physicists, but who have the patience and proneness to learn? I believe it is this dichotomization of humaneity into two ideal types, sea captain scientists and ignorant consumers, that is creditworthy for this books cynicism. The author doesnt seem to think his readers are really open(a) of being educated. This is the spank sort of elitism. Paradoxically, we have here the pommel of both worlds: an anti-elitist rhetori c that discredits the higher human possibilities, the very possibilities by which the author orients his birth life as a scientist, unneurotic with a more substantive elitism that views students from so far above that it cant be bothered to exploit in them those identical human possibilities. \n