Why Bad Science Can’t Be Good Education : Dogma cannot be allowed to funnel nonsense into children
These are perilous times for science. Scientists have long been accustomed to battling public fascination with astrology, psychics, channelers and New Age quackery, and the more pernicious efforts by religious fundamentalists to infiltrate the public schools with the arrant nonsense of “creation science.” But now comes an assault from the political left too, which has seized on false science as means of promoting multicultural political correctness, trying to replace testable science with favored myths that are more agreeable than reality.
FROM THE LEFT: An Afrocentric view holds that melanin, which makes skin dark, is at the root of a putative black superiority; melanin is said to operate as a superconductor and regulate human psychological and physiological processes. The “melanists” also argue that the white race is the product of mating between albino mutants of blacks who migrated to Europe to escape the African sun. Another theory holds that the Maya Indians came to Earth in the form of genetic information from another solar system. There are comparable formulations from radical feminists and American Indians. Some of this has made its way into schools, sometimes as part of well-meaning efforts, for example, to bolster the self-esteem of black youths.
These trends were a significant topic of discussion at the annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Francisco last week. Some of the false notions have managed to gain credibility in schools. For instance, a textbook used to train multicultural teachers argues that the well-established anthropological fact that native American peoples migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait is just an “unsubstantiated” theory of white scientists.
False science has been given witting or unwitting support by some “post-modernist” scholars who argue that all knowledge is relative and traditional Western scientists have no greater claim to explaining reality than other thinkers.
FROM THE RIGHT: And public school decentralization, however beneficial in other respects, has made it easier for pressure groups to get science claptrap into the classroom. In many cases science teachers have valiantly fought creationist efforts but have been cowed into agreeing that evolution is “just” a theory. Although science continues to debate the fine points, evolution has been proven beyond any doubt, no more open to question than whether the Earth is round. Pressure groups have been aggressive in advancing their views. So right-thinking parents must come forward to support teachers in resisting the forces of ignorance. An ally for them in this is the Berkeley-based National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group that maintains a hot line, (800) 290-6006.
To be sure, science is not as pure as some of its mandarins would have us believe. Greed, envy and personal aggrandizement are often as much the motives in scientific creativity as the search for truth. And examples of scientific fraud and error abound.
But dogma, religious or otherwise, cannot be allowed to funnel nonsense into our children. “Science does not contradict religion,” says Francisco Ayala, a former Jesuit priest who is a geneticist at UC Irvine and the president-elect of the AAAS. Religion has a legitimate role in the discourse over the ultimate origin of matter, a mystery that science may never solve. But to seek refuge from scientific uncertainty in the irrational is absurd and dangerous. Scientific and technological prowess is critical to American competitiveness in a global economy. Some of our schools are bad enough, too often graduating semiliterate youngsters ill-equipped to function in the modern world. To mis-educate them also in science is self-defeating ignorance that borders on intellectual and economic suicide.
