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Science Education in a Changing World

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Science Education in a Changing World
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Advancements in neutrino research were long neglected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Frederick Reines who had discovered the electron neutrino together with Clyde Cowan (1919-1974) in 1956 received a Nobel Prize in Physics almost forty years later in 1995. Leon Lederman was luckier. In 1988, he belonged to the trio who received the first neutrino related Nobel Prize in Physics. Together with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger Lederman had discovered the muon neutrino in the early 1960s. Their discovery was so important because it established the existence of a second family of elementary particles. “I have offered the organizers a choice of topics and to my pleasure they choose science education”, Lederman justifies the non-scientific subject of his lecture. Referring to the US National Commission’s 1983 report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform” he emphasizes the importance of science education. Driven by a kind of interactive spiral “where science generates technology and technology then enables new science to grow” the world is changing at an accelerating pace. This development is - at least in the industrialized countries - associated with huge benefits such as economic prosperity, high standard of living, and increasing longevity. Yet it has also a dark side, exemplified by phenomena such as air pollution, global warming, destruction of biodiversity, and a widening welfare gap between the developed and the developing world. Consequently, Lederman says, the number of public policy controversies that requires scientific and technical knowledge is increasing. In his opinion, education in science, mathematics and technology has to address mainly three target groups: Young people to ensure a continuous flow of new scientists and engineers, the workforce of the industry to keep their skills adapted to the technological progress in their sector, and, above all, the general public - because the preservation of democratic government will depend on a sufficient public understanding of science and technology. In the second part of his lecture, Leon Lederman describes his work for the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science in Chicago. His commitment is well motivated: 20.000 of the 24.000 teachers of the school system of Chicago and Illinois “must teach some math and science even if they are not trained to do so”. Of the 400.000 students (at the end of the 1980s), 60 percent lived below the poverty level, and 46 percent never finished high school. The educational bureaucracy was slow in coping with this challenge. At the same time, Chicago with all its universities and research institutions had enormous intellectual resources. This led to the foundation of the “Academy”, in which teachers were taught how to teach science to children. It rests on the fundamental belief that all children can learn and that “education breaks the cycle of poverty, lack of jobs, crime and so on”. Teachers can also learn - and scientists can make them familiar with improved techniques: Teach less information, but in greater depth; move away from simple transmission of knowledge to a student-centered stimulation of learning; replace textbooks by active investigation. “Activity-based - hands-on - playing and learning are the keywords”, Lederman argues and gives some examples of respective tuition techniques. Turning directly to the young scientists in his audience at the end of his talk, Lederman reminds them that physics research is not as easy as it looks in all those fascinating lectures they had the privilege to witness in Lindau, but that it is rather “full of frustration and disappointment and agony if you are more or less a normal human being”. Nevertheless, he continues, “I recommend to you the life of a physicist. The subject literally dances with vitality. Physics is full of rewards. There is exciting challenge, there is incredible beauty and there is ultimate social utility, what more can you ask?” The audio tape records almost one minute of enthusiastic applause for Lederman’s warmhearted, humorous and ambitious talk. Joachim Pietzsch
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, students and colleagues. This is somewhat of a change of pace. I will not talk about easy things like condensed matter physics or the origin of the universe, but I will discuss something somewhat more difficult, which is the mind
of a child. I also want to remind my colleagues from the United States that this is 4th of July. Happy 4th of July. We didn't have any firecrackers. Instead, I've invented a firecracker I used to amuse my children with.
Okay. Let me make a confession. I offered the organizers of Togung a choice of topics. And to my pleasure, they selected science education.
Now how did I, a high energy physicist, come to this subject? Most of us with this very curious color of hair look for new challenges outside of our well-established metiers.
After all, Mossbauer changed to neutrinos, Glashow went into billiards, and of course I had, as essentially all of my colleagues, have lectured seriously to physics students. And I had for a long time lectured seriously to students who are not in physics, non-science
students. For it is the students of the social sciences and of law and of economics and of journalism and even of humanities that sooner or later come to organize and control our society. And I reasoned that the more science they could be helped to understand, the safer
I could sleep. However, I must confess that it was only after I received the Nobel Prize that I found my ideas about science education were being listened to. Two things happen when you come home from Stockholm. One thing is very ordinary.
My wife keeps insisting that I take out the rubbish. And after I resisted and said, I am a Nobel Prize winner, I then looked at her and I took out the rubbish.
The second interesting thing that happened is you became slowly aware of the mystique of the Nobel Prize. For example, you automatically become an expert on all subjects. And I have discussed learnedly the Brazilian foreign debt, the length of women's dresses,
and the relative merits of the Grateful Dead over the Beatles. For example, journalists, tell me Professor Letterman, how long should women's dresses be in 1992? Letterman, as short as possible.
I also found that competition in experimental physics was getting very serious. And I was always aware of the dangers of competition. You all know the sort of competition between Bohr and Einstein to talk about a famous incident
in our subject where they would argue about quantum mechanics and argue all the time in this friendly, competitive way. There's a very little known story that Bohr and Einstein took a walk in the woods and
suddenly while arguing about whether quantum mechanics was real or not, they saw an enormous bear whereupon Einstein took his Adidas out of his knapsack and started putting them on. And Bohr, always being a little more pedantic, said, what are you doing, Einstein? And Einstein says, I'm putting on my Adidas sneakers so I can run away from the bear.
And Bohr said, everyone knows you can't run faster than a bear, whereupon Einstein answered, I don't have to, dear colleague, I only have to run faster than you.
Deeply involved in a very serious effort to reform science education in the city of Chicago, I've given many talks on this subject and I had a lot of problems in trying
to prepare it for this audience. I somehow feel like Shahjia Gabor's seventh husband, I know what to do, but how do I make it interesting? I'm just wondering how the translator goes with that. Actually, what I found in the last few months was that there's a kind of new international
invariant. Educational reform and a global concern for science and math education seems to be prevalent. No subject, it seems, arouses so much chauvinism in people as their education.
A sense of concern and anxiety with the products of the educational system seems to have set in in country after country. This touches us in two fundamental ways. One has to do with culture and the other has to do with economics.
In the United States, a traumatic reexamination of the values, the content, the goals, and the infrastructure of our educational system began in 1983 with a national commission report called A Nation at Risk. It was filled with nationalistic rhetoric, with military metaphors, something like we
have committed unilateral educational disarmament and so on. We are drowning in a rising tide of mediocrity. Now the same sort of examination is going on in most of the industrialized world. In most cases, resulting in a loss of confidence in national educational systems.
In the US, George Bush campaigned as the education president. In Japan, in France, in the UK, in Sweden, educational reform has become front page news. In Holland, educational reform is in full swing and students are rioting, not for
time-honored reasons but because of educational dissatisfaction. My title also includes the fact that the world is changing. The question is why are we so concerned now? Why is this happening? Citizens of industrial society live in an age of science and technology driven by a kind of interactive spiral where science generates technology and technology then enables
new science to grow. For example, the new instruments you've seen, the particle accelerators and so on. Vast new instruments depending on a technology which itself was born from a science.
So you get science begets technology begets more science and the technology produces economic benefits and prestige which encourages governments to continue to invest in science and technology. And this is an ever-ascending spiral and accounts for the fact that the pace of change keeps increasing so that what happened in the last 10 years is equivalent to what
happened in the previous 30 years and so on. Additional ingredients in this increasing pace of change has to do with modern communications and information transfer. For example, I can't imagine how I could have lived without my fax machine.
And I think the pace of change, even the political changes that took place with such an amazing rapidity in Eastern Europe, very close to here, must have been affected by the rapid communication so that if somebody throws a stone in Ulan Batur you can read
about it in a Brazilian village almost immediately. Finally, there is this rising dominance of sort of global institutions, corporations, so IBM, as we know very well, does research in Zurich and the Japanese, I understand, have just bought Princeton and so on.
National borders become increasingly transparent to those issues which were traditionally thought to be national and to contribute to national competitiveness. This is beginning to lead some economists and some national leaders to a recognition that human resources, scientists, engineers, a highly skilled workforce, the people in
the nation are among the qualities that remain more or less as national assets and therefore may require more attention. Science and technology have brought huge social benefits to the citizens of industrial societies.
Relative economic prosperity, a very high standard of living, increasing longevity, access to art and music of the world, and the leisure to make use of it. But as we all now recognize there is a dark side and just to cheer you up before lunch
I'll give you a listing of it, clearly an incomplete listing. Perhaps foremost, I don't know if it's foremost, is the question of the greenhouse effect and global warming, still with very large uncertainties. How much warming and what are the effects? A recent US National Academy of Science study gives us a very uncomfortable review
of the prognosis. NASA has recently measured the thinning of the ozone layer and concludes that the effect is much worse than had been anticipated. And there are problems like acid rain and the seemingly insoluble problem of toxic and nuclear waste disposal, urban and air pollution, unstoppable apparently industrial accidents
like Bhopal and the Three Mile Island in Chernobyl and the enormous fire in Louisiana and the great Rhine spill and oil spills almost everywhere, Kuwait oil fires, destruction of the rain forests, everybody very happy now, which contribute to the greenhouse effect
and also destroys this irretrievable biodiversity of species. Pandemic diseases like AIDS and Legionnaires keep appearing and looking ahead there is a longer-aged concern for depletion of natural material resources in which high-sex
societies increasingly dependent, nickel and cobalt and chromium, even high-grade iron ore. Both the social benefits and the social penalties require science, engineering, technology and therefore science education. All of this indicates to me three segments of the population which must be targeted
for improved education in science, mathematics and technology. One, there must be an assurance that science continues to receive the essential flow of and eager to continue the kind of research that you have sampled in these last few days
and in so many other fields from anthropology to zoology. Industry is increasingly dissatisfied with the additions to the workforce where increasingly the worker must know some scientific thinking, must have control of scientific thinking and some mathematical skills and thirdly, the preservation of democratic government depends
in my opinion on the expansion of public understanding of science and of technology. The number of public policy controversies that require some scientific and technical knowledge and thinking is increasing. Many issues, there is the question of population growth on the planet with its inevitable
consequences of enhancing the ecological problems. Again, overriding problems of science and technology, the wide gap between developing nations and the third world in these era of instant communication as we've already seen,
it seems to me to be politically totally unacceptable that we maintain this enormous standard of living gap between the so-called North and the South. And finally, we have to remember that the Cold War is over, yes, but as long as we have 50,000 nuclear warheads, we are all living under a sword of Damocles,
the ultimate ecological catastrophe and we must find a way of instilling rationality into this very dangerous issue. So, you see that we have these tremendous problems and we have these three kinds of skills that we need.
We need skills in the workforce, we need a flow of scientists and engineers, the professionals, and then above all I think we need the expansion of public understanding of science and technology because that's the only way to preserve democratic government
and so on. In fact, what we see is a general decline if measurements are any good in the understanding of science and technology in the part of the general public. Still, the general public increasingly demands some part in decision making about the practice
and applications of science. Look at the green movement, at animal rights activists, at concerns about pesticides and gene splicing and in all of these things which have valid elements of concern, there is a spectrum of activities including activities which really are based on ignorance
and an ignorance merging into fear and irrational fear, which tend to have a tremendous negative effect on many fields of science. Popular interest in science and there's a lot of popular interest in science doesn't reflect in an understanding of science or an understanding of scientists and I can tell you my personal experience.
I was on a train coming out of Chicago and onto the train came a nurse with a group of patients from the local mental hospital and as soon as she got them settled, she counted them, one, two, three, four and then she looked at me and said, who are you? And I said, I'm Leon Letterman, I won the Nobel Prize. At night she says, yes, I know, five, six, seven.
Or take the standard picture of the scientist that you see in a movie from Hollywood. He's always wearing a white coat, very thick glasses, he always carries a cat, which he strokes as he describes how he's going to destroy the world.
An important and of course even a crucial aspect in the public understanding of science is the fact that science is expensive and the public support is crucial. So far the public has been willing to support science as a matter of trust and the fact that they credit science with the miracles of modern technology but this is a fragile relationship unless scientists make a strenuous effort
to communicate with the public through books, which they do very well, newspapers, magazine articles, and above all TV as a fantastic possibility for communicating with the public. Well, to summarize, I have sort of three reasons that I see for myself
as to why general science literacy is important and that it has to be targeted everywhere from the youngest child to the public already beyond school. Science, mathematics, and technology are part of our culture, of course,
like art, literature, and humanistic studies that enriches the life of the individual. Also, we also mention the workforce, working occupations of all kinds tend to need some understanding of science and we already mention the public. And again, in the U.S. and I think in other countries I've seen with less certainty,
I've seen demographic projections which indicate that there are possibilities of large shortages of scientists and engineers in many countries. In the U.S., the demographics seem to indicate this. These projections are always full of uncertainties.
They're not clear as to what will happen. But if you add to the traditional pursuits of science the kinds of things I listed, the kinds of ecological problems that lie ahead as an extra burden on science, then I'm quite confident that we will in fact, in all industrial societies and in developing countries too, find shortages of scientists
and have to concentrate on bringing into science and certainly into physics groups that traditionally have not been represented, minority groups, women, count the number of women among your students and clearly we all agree there are not enough.
I think these things, these things I tend to think are international variants. So, just to summarize this part, we see a changing world which is placing great new burdens on how we educate our children for life in the 21st century. These new burdens apply to all stages from 5-year-olds to 22-year-olds
and indeed to a need to raise a level of science literacy of the general public. I see this in the U.S. and I see concerns also in Europe of projected shortages of trained scientists in part due to demographic trends and in part due to the new scientific challenges.
Let me now switch over to some slides to continue and tell you a little story about what I'm doing and what's happening in the U.S. and Chicago. Just to review or illustrate some of these things, here are some headlights, headlights, headlines. This is actually from the Wall Street Journal
in which you very rarely expect to see the word revolution. But this just has to do with examining the kinds of training that people need just to get jobs. Our schools aren't teaching what tomorrow's workers need to know.
And here are some of these projections, demographic projections which are too many significant figures clearly, but there are projections which have some validity. They may not be completely accurate because they are long-range projections of severe shortages of scientists and engineers to do the job that has to be done.
Now with all of this interest, the question is what are the results? What are people doing to react to this? And the general word are school reform. And there are serious reconsiderations of how we teach children and why it is that at least in many countries,
there's probably not in Germany, but that may be temporary, increasing number of students who go away from science, who shift from science. So the general components in school reform,
which I list here, have to do with the fact that there are new developments, new ideas in how you teach, new curricula. A new curricula which says you don't teach everything that is known, but you teach a large, largely less in the way of information, but in greater depth.
And there's a shift from a simple transmission of knowledge where the teacher stands up, reads from the textbook or recites all the things that the child must know to a kind of student-centered stimulation of learning. An important component is in order to do that,
the teacher must be much more comfortable with science than most teachers are. So improve training of teachers in the content, namely in the physics and the chemistry and the mathematics that teachers have to teach. And in teaching methods and in treating teachers as professionals like engineers or lawyers.
And then there's problems of how you measure achievement. When we do experiments in physics, if we don't get feedback, while we're doing the experiment, we know that a year or two later, we'll have a lot of data that doesn't mean anything. In the same way, when we're trying to modify an educational system, we have to have very rapid methods for measuring achievement.
There are advances in understanding of how students learn. This comes out of research and cognition about how children think. And this always points to new, constructive, active view, which replaces sort of a passive absorption of information.
You want the student to be involved, to be active, to be caught up in the information as relevant to themselves. Then, of course, there are new technologies. Computers and calculators and software, for example, all of the mathematics taught from five years old to 20 years old
can be done with a hand calculator. And if you ignore that, you're ignoring a major change in what is important in the teaching of mathematics and science. Many of these things have been tried. They've been tried on small groups and small numbers in one school here and three schools there and so on.
And in general, this so-called activity-based, these are the key words, hands-on, playing and learning. I think Professor Binig mentioned about the importance of playing when you're involved in some intellectual activity. Textbooks are replaced in early grades with active investigation,
something like inquiry method, where the child is led to try to discover things about the science that is being presented, replacing standard sort of memory, memorizing of formulas and facts. One of the hardest things you get into in educational reform,
although you know how to do it, there are really two main obstacles. One, and they're not unrelated. One has to do with the general problem that there's a kind of inertia. The public, I think, and the United States certainly, doesn't appreciate the need for radical reform of science education.
And the other obstacle is the bureaucracy. An entrenched educational administrative infrastructure has many reasons for getting in the way of reform. And so central control seems to be the major obstacle. I noticed that in the discussions about the Japanese reform,
which is going on now, and certainly in France, where somewhere in some building, somewhere in the middle of Tokyo or Paris and certainly in Washington, there are people who know how to reform education, and they write the rules, and they will not do anything in the way of making the kinds of radical changes that are needed.
As you can see from this that I've had some bitter experience in my own efforts, mostly based on my trips to Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. is an interesting city. I recommend you all visit it. It's the only city in the world in which the speed of sound is more than the speed of light.
Chicago is a typical U.S. city, and I want to particularly bring that because when we say the north and the south as a distinguished, we also in the U.S., and I know certainly in Europe, too, in some places, there are parts of the industrial societies
which mirror the developing countries in all sorts of ways. Chicago, in the school system, and I'm not talking about the city, but the school system, the school system has 400,000 students, so it's a big school system, the third largest in the U.S., some 24,000 teachers, of which about 20,000 must teach some math and science
even though they're not trained to teach math and science. In the U.S., if you're teaching a 5 or 6 or a 7 or 8-year-old, the teacher teaches all the subjects, history and language and science and mathematics. In the city of Chicago, 88% of the students are black or Hispanic,
10% are white, 60% of the students belong to families that are below the poverty level, 46% never finish high school even though that's a legal requirement. They score very low on any national tests,
and of course like any large major city in the U.S., there's crime and drugs and teenage pregnancy and many, many other problems. But on the positive side, Chicago has instituted in the last 2 or 3 years the most dramatic school reform ever,
and I'll say a few words about that. And in Chicago, there are enormous intellectual resources. All of them have some interest in science education. For example, there are 14 universities, there are 9 science museums, there are 2 large national laboratories, an enormous amount of research done by industry,
by large multinational corporations that are headquartered in Chicago and have research labs in the area. And so if you put all of these things together and you add one Nobel Prize winner with gray hair, you might just possibly form some new institution that could bypass in some sense the educational bureaucracy
and create some new way of dealing with these particular terrific problems, very difficult problems. Well, it's called the Academy for Teachers of Mathematics and Science in Chicago, and it starts out with some fundamental philosophical beliefs.
One is that all children can learn, even poor children can learn, even children with no parental support, even children who live in ghettos and neighborhoods full of all sorts of problems, even children arriving at school sometimes hungry because they haven't had a breakfast. We also believe that teacher is the key to learning,
but teachers in general are themselves uncomfortable with mathematics and science, and so that has to change. And then we also believe that these teachers can learn and that scientists, in fact, can help to organize their learning because it'll take too long to sort of repair, even though that has to be done too,
the educational bureaucracy which produces teachers in the first place. There are new techniques for delivering math and science education which work for teachers and work for students, and they are already tested, and I'll try to give you some brief example of some of these new techniques. And then, of course, we also believe that education
is a key ingredient to try to break the cycle of poverty and lack of jobs and crime and so on. So this is the basic plan. The big problem is, the big problem is, does it work?
And what we're trying to do in some very simplistic way is to take ideas that have been tried in many places. It's interesting that when I arrived in Chicago just two years ago, I found that many of my colleagues in the universities, physicists,
even a chemist or two, mathematicians, were in fact busy trying to help the schools and inventing ideas for how to teach children and how to teach teachers to teach children science in a way that would appeal to children with some of these new techniques,
these activity-based hands-on techniques where, as you'll see, you use the simplest kind of apparatus, sugar cubes, not sugar cubes that come from the neutron star, but real sugar cubes in which children can make dots on the sugars to convert them to dominoes of the one and the two and the three
and then do numerical studies on them. Concentrating on fundamental concepts like lengths and areas and volumes and masses and time, doing a lot of graphing. I mean, there's a technique which is called teaching integrated math and science where the science and the math are taken together
and related to the world of the child, not as an abstract subject but as a practical subject and a subject in which you can play as well as learn. Children are taught to draw a picture identifying a particular experiment. It's amazing to see six- and seven-year-old children
who have difficulty speaking but saying smoothly, independent variable and dependent variable. They learn to collect data and organize the data in a table to make graphs and to analyze the entire experiment. I'll give you just some ideas of some of the simplest things, for example.
There's something called the grab bag where the children reaches into a bag and picks out some shapes. They could be triangles, squares, stars, and then is taught to list the number of each kind and to draw a graph. So many triangles, so many squares, so many stars.
And then the child is asked questions to make sure they understand the exercise. What is the manipulated variable? That's not the dependent variable. What shape was most common in Mary's pile? Well, the square was most common. How many triangular shapes did Mary pull out? Well, from the graph she reads two.
Another graph has to do with the size of spheres, and there are three sizes, large, medium, and small. Again, you put numbers, you put numbers on a graph, you analyze the graph, more sophisticated, less sophisticated. Here you teach measures of various kinds.
For example, here's where each child lists the number of streets they have to walk to school. And Mary walks three streets, and Bill walks four streets, and Jan walks two streets, and they make a graph. And so they learn little by little something about distributions and how to read the data.
And then they learn something about estimations. A very interesting graph had to do with soap bubbles experiment. In which the children blew soap bubbles, which was a lot of fun, caught them, and then with a stopwatch calculated the lifetime of the soap bubble. And so here's a distribution curve for lifetimes of soap bubbles.
And then to cheer the children up,
well, here's some real experiments where they slide little toys down incline planes and see how much they slide up on the other side. There's a lot of emphasis on proportional reasoning, where you take a little tube, you roll up a piece of paper,
and you look at a ruler, paste it on the wall, and then you change your distance and look at the different size of rules. I've seen these things work. I've seen teachers that have taught for 20 years absolutely ecstatic about the results of learning how to do this with children.
This isn't the total solution to the problem of education. Clearly you need more rigor, but this is certainly a very good way to start. Okay, let me conclude. Let me take some concluding remarks, because this problem of applying it to an entire city is still a long way from being realized.
Social activism is considerably helped by having a Nobel Prize. I recommend that to all of you. Physics students, of course, you young students, must stay with your studies and with your research 99% of your time. I believe in that. But if you occasionally look away and keep involved
and aware that it's important for you too to keep science healthy, at some point some of you may want to consider teaching as an important addition to your career. So, of course, my distinguished colleagues here, I know many of them are well aware,
all of them are well aware of all of these problems. They communicate with you so beautifully. Communicating with the general public is a special effort, which, of course, all of us know we have to do. But while I have the chance, let me say a few words to the physics students here, which I enjoy so much talking to.
In the past few days you have been very briefly exposed to some fantastic array of incredibly beautiful physics. But don't be misled because it looked so easy. Physics research is full of frustration and disappointment and agony if you're more or less a normal human being. You will certainly be subject to disappointments,
even despair at the ignorant resistance of your accomplices in research, your bureaucrats and your professors, and even more at the stupidity of your equipment, which refuses to work the way it's supposed to, and of the resourcefulness of nature in hiding your secrets. But with all of that, let me warmly welcome you and recommend to you the life of a physicist.
Today, as you've already seen, the subject literally dances with vitality, astrophysics, particle physics, solid state, the physics of materials, observations of new phenomenon, and in the fantastic precisions that can be achieved in solitary contemplation at 3 o'clock in the morning or in collaborative groups going after some profound concept
with huge devices, physics is full of rewards from Galileo's demonstration that if you throw a stone, it describes a parabola, to Glashow's mysterious billiard ball, which also describes a parabola, I don't know how. There is exciting challenge, there is incredible beauty,
and there is ultimate social utility. What more can you ask? Thank you very much.