What Science Education Could Be: Escalating Ambition about Relevance

Sarah Dillard

The Problem with High School Science Education Today: The Nitty-Gritty

Of the four core academic subjects, science education suffers most from a lack of ambition about its own relevance.

A typical high school science class dives straight into facts--here are the parts of the cell; there, the periodic table of elements. These are building blocks to scientific understanding. But they are often introduced without real-world connections even though they are what make up the real world.

The vast majority of Americans are not going to use science as part of their jobs and will quickly forget what they learn in their standard high school science classes.

In fact, America teaches science in a way that students are most likely to forget and least likely to apply. In the EU, it is common to teach some of biology, chemistry, and physics each year. The subjects are cycled back to, and exams are taken at the end of high school. This involves spacing, interleaving, and retrieval of material--cognitive practices shown to make learning stick.

In America, by contrast, we binge a single subject in a given year and may never revisit it. If we were going to design science education in a way that ensured it would be forgotten, this is how we would design it.

The Problem with High School Science Education Today: The Bigger Picture

Science has changed everything about our world and how we understand our place in it in the last 500 years. The pace of scientific change is so rapid, in fact, that the approach we use in high school doesn't give students the knowledge to interpret science by the time they are middle-aged adults.

The story of science should dazzle even the least science-inclined—but we never tell it. Science has grown up side by side with us, at times an enabler and at times a destroyer. It's not just a dazzling story, but an exciting one, with heroes and villains, triumphs and setbacks, and ethical quandaries woven throughout. But engaging students isn't the only reason to emphasize teaching the stories of science—I’ll return to this later.

Discussing the shortcomings of American science education is a crucial first step towards dreaming up better alternatives. But to determine just how grave this problem really is, we need to look closely at what we believe the goals of science education to be and whether our system is designed to meet them. So let’s zoom out: what is the point of science education?

The first possible answer is creating more scientists.

Our Schools Are Not Creating Scientists

Over the last fifty years, much has been done in the name of increasing, improving, and expanding STEM education with the hope of creating more scientists. In a way, American efforts have been very successful: we lead the world in science & especially in scientific industry.

But a lot of this success is due to immigration policy, which does almost as much for our scientific workforce as our schools: Immigrants represent 25% of American science & technology workers overall, and 45% of the doctoral-level workforce. The return on investment on immigration is astronomically high.

But arguably, increasing the number of scientists is not even where we should be focusing our science education efforts. Our society’s most consequential shortage isn't one of scientific excellence, but of a scientifically literate citizenry.

Our Schools are Not Producing Scientific Literacy

The pandemic has shown us that cultivating scientific literacy should be the number one goal of science education. More than one American company created safe, effective vaccines—but many Americans had a hard time accepting the word of scientists.

As products of the American education system, the anti-vaxxers were required to take a couple of years of lab science in high school. But they were never required to contemplate the ethical implications of science or consider how science works.

The 5% of Americans who are scientists may naturally keep pace with scientific change, but the rest of us are left to muddle through. Some take scientists on faith; others turn to their faith leaders on science.

Too few of us, however, understand the basics of the science or what’s at stake.

The Solution: Cultivating Scientific Literacy

Learning to read science texts takes a little work, but it has a long payoff: it is a key to having a science-educated citizenry, not once for a test in high school but over the long term. This is the biggest reason that teaching the stories of science is so important.

I’ve only started reading science books as an adult. Not textbooks, but books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction or Siddharta Mukherjee’s The Gene. The more of them I read, the less I understand why we don’t teach books like these in school: they dismantle the all-too-common assumption that science is purely academic, containing nothing to motivate social or popular interest.

Building the skills and the habit of reading and discussing science books is the best bet on a science-educated citizenry I can think to make.

But it’s not the only benefit to science reading. These texts also:

Make use of story, a powerful way we learn and remember.
Provide exposure to more areas of science than a typical lab course can.
Take us to the frontier of knowledge.
Offer a glimpse into what it is like to be a scientist and do science.
Are designed, unlike the average science textbook, to be as engaging as possible.
Often include questions of ethics alongside those of science.

Science texts can be challenging. Because of this, it makes sense to teach them in school with scaffolding so that students learn how to work through them. And once students have learned how to read them, they’re equipped to follow science just like they can follow music, politics, or any other interest.

Scientific reading will increase scientific literacy, and it may also do a lot to increase interest in science. I'd conjecture that the most untapped way for our schools to produce more scientists is to tap into what is inherently interesting about science: the way it connects to our humanity. This is exactly what science reading does.

Conclusion

When I was in high school, the human genome had not been fully sequenced, an AI could barely defeat a chess grandmaster, and climate change seemed theoretical. Today, anyone can get their genome sequenced for less than 1,000 dollars; AI is making significant inroads not just where there is an objectively best answer, but into art and writing; and the effects of climate change are obvious to even the casual observer.

If we want a shot at a better future, we need more people to keep up with the literature.

A scientifically literate citizenry is the difference of hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the pandemic, of investing billions now to mitigate climate change rather than trillions later. Science has never had a big enough constituency, but we've never tried to cultivate one. High school science classes are the place to start.

What High School Science Could Be: Getting Ambitious About Relevance