Science in Gen Ed

In the 1945 report, General Education in a Free Society (the Redbook), the Faculty Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society recommended the creation of two new courses in science for the non-scientist. One was on the principles of biological science, the other on the principles of physical science. "Both courses are to be planned primarily to give students an insight into the fundamental principles of the subject and the nature of the scientific enterprise. In neither of them is a systematic factual survey contemplated. Both courses should communicate by discussion and example the methods by which scientific knowledge has advanced within the past four hundred years and should illustrate the combination of logical analysis, careful observation and experiment, and imaginative insight which has characterized the great scientific advances of the past."

The means to these ends were to lean heavily on the history and philosophy of science, for, "The claim of general education is that the history of science is part of science. So are its philosophy, its great literature, and its social and intellectual context.... The historical development of the subjects considered in our courses, therefore, should occupy an important place in their design." In fact, the Redbook seemed wary of teaching the substance of a science directly; it preferred to embed the science in a matrix of history and philosophy.

Fourteen years later, the program of General Education in science seemed moribund because no one, outside of a small hard core of dedicated professors, wanted to teach the courses. Examining the problems, the Bruner Committee, a subcommittee of the Committee on Educational Policy, essentially recommended that the limits on the substance of a Gen Ed course be removed in order to entice Faculty members into the program. "The course we envisage will, therefore, be general in its implications, but its generality will not derive from a technological, survey-like, methodological, or historical approach. At its center will be elementary instruction in the substance and procedure of a particular science, conducted by the study of exemplary topics and supplemented by reference to such technological, philosophical, and historical materials as are necessary to present its scientific material in a pedagogically effective way. We do not wish to propose a formula for courses in Natural Science." Indeed, by not specifying where the generality of the Gen Ed science course would come from, by offering no criteria either for selecting exemplary topics or for evaluating pedagogically effective presentation of scientific material, the Bruner Committee offered the scientific departments a blank check: the student learns to understand science by doing science itself, the Committee said; therefore, come ye and teach science.

In a 1963 article on "Science for nonscientists: criteria for college programs," Gerald Holton, one of the hard core of teachers of Gen Ed science, reacted against the inducements which the Bruner Committee offered. "In search of manpower, everything becomes equal to everything else." He recommended instead "at least two successive full-year courses, one centered on the physical, the other on the biological sciences, to be preceded by sound, testable achievement in high school." The first was to be "a specially developed, hard-hitting, substance-centered physical science course combined with mathematics, one which uses the major formative cases in the development of physical science as a skeleton on which to base case studies in depth."

Holton's is one of the alternatives now facing the Doty Committee. There are other possibilities.

Problems with the Program

The Doty Committee will observe that the Gen Ed science courses have moved toward serving the purposes of the scientific departments: Nat Sci 2 satisfies the physics requirement for concentration in Biochemical Sciences, and cannot be taken for credit in addition to Physics 1; Nat Sci 5 alternates with Biology 2 in Biology and Biochemical Sciences; Nat Sci 10 is required for concentration in Geology. (Nat Sci 4--unclassifiable--and Nat Sci 9, an astronomy course, alone remain.) The Faculty has even recognized some kind of equivalence between departmental and Gen Ed science courses by allowing two elementary science courses or one more advanced to fill the Gen Ed requirement.

There is an obvious reason why the Gen Ed courses have moved toward the departmental, one which the Bruner Committee and Holton observed: there is no Department of General Education, and teachers looking to ascend within their departments or professional careers find more rewarding, and easier to teach, courses with departmental content.

But there may also be another reason for the drift toward the departmental. In order to attain "an insight into the fundamental principles of the subject and the nature of the scientific enterprise," i.e., what the Redbook calls the "structure" of a science or of science, the student needs a thorough, and more likely, a profound, grasp of the components of the subject, of the bricks of the structure. The student has to know things before he can appreciate what they mean in a broader view.

Given students who know little about an area of science, one solution--the Redbook's, Holton's, and one allowed by the Bruner Committee--is to select topics as representative and explore them in depth. The difficulty here is that without his teachers' breadth of knowledge, the student cannot know for himself whether and in what way the selected topics are exemplary. The selection must appear arbitrary because the student has no knowledge of the field from which it is made. Moreover, Gen Ed science courses which study selected topics in depth in order to induce useful generalizations about science encounter an additional difficulty: because the topic and treatment have been selected for him, the student, if he lacks other background, fails to grapple with, perhaps even to see, the very problem of selection which his teacher has solved for him. The talents of the man who has thought deeply about his field are necessarily wasted on students who have no conception of the field's problems. The apparent arbitrariness of the selected topics, and the failure to see the problems to which answers are offered, may explain the difficulty topical Gen Ed courses have in motivating their students.

An alternative to the topical approach is a foundation course, an extensive introduction to a whole field. Such a course guarantees the legitimate generality which the Bruner Committee and the Redbook desired, and avoids the arbitrary choice to topics which Holton feared, although it need not supply the perspective all three desired. This solution turns the course into an introduction to the field, thus a departmental course. (For concreteness, Nat Sci 4 and Nat Sci 5 may be considered the most successful examples of the topical and survey approaches, respectively.)

Some Recommendations

Some recommendations follow if one accepts the latter alternative.

Non-scientists should be required to take an introductory, laboratory course in one of the scientific departments. These courses are of two kinds. The survey, such as Psychology 50, covers all the major areas and techniques of the field. The "tool" course provides the fundamental concepts and techniques on which all further work is based, though not covering the substance of the further work; e.g. the chemical calculations taught in Chemistry 2 are needed for organic chemistry, but Chemistry 2 includes no organic chemistry. Both kinds of courses will supply the first-hand experience with the science on which the "insights" the Redbook desires can be based.

The mixture of concentrators and non-concentrators should have salutary effects on both groups: a section man in Nat Sci 5 commented, "The premeds and the biologists ask, 'What are the facts?' and the others ask, 'What do they mean?' They learn from each other."

Once the student acquires a basic and broad acquaintance with a field through an introductory course, there should be available to him science courses in General Education proper which assume and draw on his knowledge. These courses should take up explicitly three issues usually ignored in the departmental courses: first, the methods of sciences, analyzed and compared on the basis of a grasp of at least one method of one science; second, the grounds of scientific generalizations and theories, extending first-hand experience with theoretical calculations from introductory laboratories; third, the social context of science, starting from knowledge of at least one scientist in one real laboratory in one real department. It is these courses that would perform the "orienting" function of scientific education with Holton emphasizes. In order to make the introductory courses now called Nat Scis available through the departments, and in order to leave the field of Gen Ed open to topical courses which treat these three issues, the departmental courses currently disguised as Nat Sci should shed their false labels.

(At present, there are probably only two courses which qualify as this kind of science Gen Ed: Nash's Nat Sci 4, which presumes a high school background in science, and Holton's Nat Sci 120 (not given this year), which presumes Physics 12.)

Such Nat Sci courses, if they required a college-level introduction to a science, or the equivalent as shown by test, would offer more incentives to teachers than a lower level course attempting to treat the same three issues: an instructor could use language to which he was more accustomed; he would not constantly stumble over lack of elementary information; and he could expect spontaneous interest from the student who elected the course.

There would have to be many more such Nat Sci courses than there are now. Departments could encourage professors to take the time to teach them either by rotating them among the members of the department year by year, or by allowing individuals to give courses periodically instead of each year.

The Doty Committee might consider requiring, in addition to one introductory science course, mathematical proficiency equivalent to that provided by, say, Math. 1. The Redbook and Holton emphasized how useful, and often how essential, mathematics is for a direct approach to scientific problems; scientific literacy without the concepts of function, rate of change, and limit, and what these mean in operation, is subtile indeed.

Gen Ed for Scientists

The Redbook rightly noted that "a general education in science needs to be provided for the future scientist or technologist as well as for the general student." Thus there should also exist science Gen Ed courses which exploit the greater scientific sophistication of the concentrator in examing the three central issues of science Gen Ed.

But scientists need an additional kind of course which belongs in a Gen Ed program: surveys of problems and procedures in scientific fields other than their own. Because a Harvard degree includes just sixteen courses, the scientist cannot take introductory courses in all the fields that look interesting. The creation of concentration in Biochemical Sciences, and in Physics and Chemistry, offers pragmatic evidence of scientists' need to know more than what the departments circumscribe. A elementary biologist with Math. 1 at hand, for example, might want to look at elementary thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to see what they offer by way of models of ecosystems. Such courses could perform some of the three Gen Ed issues as well: A course for physicists might teach evolutionary and genetic theories and compare the strength of predictions and kinds of concepts used in biological theory with those in physics. A course for mathematicians in the psychology of how humans handle symbols might study the influence of notation and the availability of libraries on the discovery of theorems. Obviously, these courses would be very experimental in content and procedure.

Finally, these recommendations would leave lower-level science Gen Ed courses, i.e., those without scientific prerequisites, open to the unclassifiable experiments in elementary scientific education which departments will not support. Such lower-level courses belong under the guidance of the same organization that should be chosen to direct the freshman seminars, the Committee on General Education. The handsome financial support which is available for Gen Ed courses should attract faculty with ideas to try, and the enthusiasm and originality of the faculty should attract students with minds to try.