Reflecting upon my high school science education, there isn't very much I can remember. Physics and chemistry are largely a blur (vague recollections of Avogadro's number and the time when my experiment exploded are all that remain) and the hours I spent in biology were largely a waste. For all the pressure put on us students to excel, taking the college-level AP classes early, I graduated high school with a passion for science but almost no real knowledge of it. I was not served well by the textbook procedures and had I not already resolved to be a scientist I probably would not have continued on my chosen path.
Even now I occasionally need a refresher. Technical books and collections of symposium papers are packed full of information but generally do not make for inspiring reading. I plow through the strange words and data sets because there are questions I want to know the answers to, but my motivation for doing so is derived from other more accessible works. If not for the efforts of popularizers of science I may very well given up on my interests, deciding that science is little but an incomprehensible tangle of words and figures to which only the elite have access.
As Juan Nepote explains in the new article "The other books - A journey through science books" in the Journal of Science Communication, popular science books are an important part of the published record of science, bridging the gap between researchers and the public. Although Nepote acknowledges the truth that, in science, "It seems that what is not narrated doesn't exist," I would modify this further to read "...what is not narrated comprehensibly doesn't exist to the public." The old saw of "publish or perish" is not only true of the community of working scientists but of the relationship scientists have with the public; if we do not make our research accessible and understandable to those not well-versed in the most up-to-date science, their interest in science may perish.
What the problem often comes down to is access, both in physical and intellectual terms. The Open Access movement (especially the digitization of old, copyright-expired books) is beginning to turn the tide but the questions surrounding access to science books should not be taken lightly. Nepote writes;
Every citizen, no matter where he lives, has the right to have any book, no matter where it is. That was the slogan of the Pedagogical Missions, motivated by The Second Spanish Republic at the 30's decade in the past XX century. Even today accessibility to books is an unfinished war: we can see financial obstacles (books are expensive); management obstacles (not all books arrive to everywhere) and affective obstacles (some books seems to be invisibles or inexistent to a big part of the society).
I hardly ever buy and new science books, no matter how badly I want them, because I feel a bit ripped off paying $25 for something just over 200 pages long. It's a simple aversion, but I think it is representative of a more important point; you could write the most brilliant science book ever, but if people can't get it (for one reason or another) it might as well not exist. It may not be representative of trends as a whole, but I couldn't help but notice that a new copy of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution costs about half as much as new books about evolution like Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish; it's cheaper to pick up a piece of pseudoscience than a book about one of the most interesting recent finds in evolutionary biology. I doubt that we'll ever reach a point where good popular science books are distributed for free but I think that there does need to be a greater consciousness of how things like price can affect how widely science books are read.
Nepote's liberal use of italics can be a little grating (I couldn't help but feel that they were the verbal equivalent of someone stamping on my foot for emphasis) and more than a handful of typos mar the letter, but the piece is worth a read. If nothing else it raises some good questions. Are there enough science books? What about well-written science books? What is the usual trajectory of a good science book when it has been published? What role do they play in the dialog between scientists and the public? In a world where the internet has become both an unparalleled source of information and fetid trash heap of nonsense, are science books losing their impact? How do we encourage scientists who are gifted writers to write books for the public when there are so many demands on their time just to keep up their careers? I can't answer any of these questions to my own satisfaction, but they are certainly worthwhile to ask.
[Hat-tip to Bora for alerting me to the publication of the letter.]
- Log in to post comments
If Avogadro's # is a mole, what is Avocado's #?
A guacamole! Sorry, just had to share the lame joke from a community college chem prof I had back in 2002...
I'm going to let you in on my secret to buying new books for significantly less than list price. Buy gift cards for Borders and/or Barnes and Noble off of ebay. You can often get gift cards for about 80 to 85% face value. Combine the gift card with a ubiquitous coupon for 25 or 30% off at Borders and that $25 book costs you about $12.
Here's another trick I use. I'll collect my spare change over the course of several months and then cash it in at one of those coinstar machines in the grocery store. Usually, coinstar is a ripoff, but if you redeem the change for a amazon.com gift card coinstar is free.
Beyond all that, your post hit home with me. I'm a high school chemistry teacher and I assign my upcoming students summer reading. This year, they'll be reading Michael Shermer's Science Friction. If the students' English teacher is going to make them read the Thebian plays, the least I can do is give them something a bit more modern to read.
Like you, Brian, I couldn't read enough as a kid on dinosaurs, deep sea creatures, insects, carnivorous plants, etc. Most of my elementary and junior high science education is kind of hazy, but at the very least my formal classes never dampened that enthusiasm. But high school chem and physics is when I really started gaining an understanding of how things worked, and more importantly, a passion for understanding the nuts and bolts of things, rather than just collecting facts, primarily.
I think I felt the same about my high school biology classes as you felt about your formal classes in general. It didn't do much for me, primarily because we didn't learn much about the nuts and bolts: the mechanisms of evolution. There was too large a necessary base of disconnected knowledge before we got into actual processes. It's only now, after a physics degree, that I decided to rectify that lack in life sciences knowledge, and started reading book after book on the subject.
Anyway, my point was, I had some great teachers that did inspire me, but it helped that they taught what I wanted to know, how things work. When it came to subjects that weren't covered in the way I would have liked, this was when popular science saved the day.
But it's also true that different people find their motivation for learning different things at different times, and if it's the wrong time, they may not appreciate it whether a class is well-done or not. History is another thing I learned to appreciate only towards the end of a bachelor's degree. No fault of my high school history teacher, who I recognized even at the time as a great teacher, teaching a subject I had only a passing interest in.
Todd; Thanks for the tips. I like buying used books and I use some of the money I get from amazon.com referrals to stock my library, but I admit I have a bigger appetite for literature than I often have the funds for.
I'm glad that you'll be assigning your students some good pop science reading; I wish my teachers did that when I was in school! To be honest I never did the english class summer reading because I just wasn't interested so I'm glad you're offering an alternative. I know that experiences in high school differ from one person to another (and I do not by any means want to belittle the importance of good high school science instruction; we definitely need more of it) but my experiences weren't that good for a variety of reasons.
My high school classes, 1972-76, were pretty boring except for the science classes. I had a wonderful nun, Sr. Loretta, for biology and she was a blast. We did field trips and experiments every day, tests were lab based not just fill in the blank crap. My chemistry teacher, Mr. Nichols, was as irreverent as they come. He made chemistry so interesting even the jocks loved it. My physics teacher, Sr. Jane, was a hard nosed, practical woman who taught physics as it should be taught, principles drilled in and then lab and field tested as often as possible. I learned more in those classes than I did in the college level science classes I took for both of my degrees.