History of Science and Science Education

In the past I have argued that historians of science probably need to get more involved with the fight for good science education. Michael Barton has brought my attention to historian Abigail Lustig giving testimony before the Texas Board of Education.

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The NCSE has been posting videos of events at the Texas Board of Education — they are very informative and well worth spending some time watching. Here's an example of the bad guys: Don Patton preening smarmily and accusing Darwinism of failing because a 'prediction' had failed. The 'prediction',…
Ben Cohen over at The World's Fair has gotten me thinking about something: is there really a readership for blog posts about the history of science [HoS]? My own experience is that there may not be such a readership, or at least may not be one that engages in commentary. Admittedly, my evidence is…
Having totally borked science education in the Lone Star State, the Texas School Board is now winding up to stuff their right wing ideologies into the Social Studies curriculum. I for one can't wait until Texas leaves the Union so we can put Texas and Turkey in the same category and begin to…
I recently co-authored a paper that discussed the utility of history of science for science (Isis 99: 322-330). The abstract reads: This essay argues that science education can gain from close engagement with the history of science both in the training of prospective vocational scientists and in…

She did a great job. I was also really happy to see your Isis article. I'm a grad student in HoS and I agree that historians should play a greater role in supporting science education.

One thing that struck me at the end was the question from the audience about what the objection was to the word "weakness". I'm willing to bet that there are large segments of the anti-evolution community who don't understand why the scientific community finds the word objectionable. I'm not sure that Lustig addressed that.

By Greg Esres (not verified) on 27 Apr 2009 #permalink