The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [166]
• The teachers and curricula are ‘dumbing down’ to the lowest common denominator.
• Why is the basketball coach teaching chemistry?
• Teachers are required to spend much too much time on discipline and on ‘social curricula’. There’s no incentive to use our own judgment. The ‘brass’ are always looking over our shoulders.
• Abandon tenure in schools and colleges. Get rid of the deadwood. Leave hiring and firing to principals, deans, and superintendents.
• My joy in teaching was repeatedly thwarted by militaristic-type principals.
• Teachers should be rewarded on the basis of performance -especially student performance on standardized, nationwide tests, and improvements in student performance on such tests from one year to the next.
• Teachers are stifling our children’s minds by telling them they’re not ‘smart’ enough - for example, for a career in physics. Why not give the students a chance to take the course? • My son was promoted even though he’s reading two grade levels behind the rest of his class. The reason given was social, not educational. He’ll never catch up unless he’s left back.
• Science should be required in all school (and especially high school) curricula. It should be carefully coordinated with the math courses the students are taking at the same time. • • Most homework is ‘busy work’ rather than something that makes you think.
• I think Diane Ravitch [New Republic, 6 March 1989] tells it like it is: ‘As a female student at Hunter High School in New York City recently explained, “I make straight As, but I never talk about it ... It’s cool to do really badly. If you are interested in school and you show it, you’re a nerd”... The popular culture - through television, movies, magazines, and videos - incessantly drums in the message to young women that it is better to be popular, sexy, and “cool” than to be intelligent, accomplished, and outspoken...’In 1986 researchers found a similar anti-academic ethos among both high school and female students in Washington, D.C. They noted that able students faced strong peer pressure not to succeed in school. If they did well in their studies, they might be accused of ‘acting white’.
• Schools could easily give much more recognition and rewards to kids who are outstanding in science and math. Why don’t they? Why not special jackets with school letters? Announcements in assembly and the school newspaper and the local press? Local industry and social organizations to give special awards? This costs very little and could overcome peer pressure not to excel.
• Headstart is the single most effective... program for improving children’s understanding of science and everything else.
There were also many passionate, highly controversial opinions expressed which, at the very least, give a sense of how deeply people feel about the subject. Here’s a smattering:
• All the smart kids are looking for the fast buck these days, so they become lawyers, not scientists.
• I don’t want you to improve education. Then there’d be nobody to drive the cabs.
• The problem in science education is that God isn’t sufficiently honored.
• The fundamentalist teaching that science is ‘humanism’ and is to be mistrusted is the reason nobody understands science. Religions are afraid of the sceptical thinking at the heart of science. Students are brainwashed not to accept scientific thinking long before they get to college.
• Science has discredited itself. It works for politicians. It makes weapons, it lies about marijuana ‘hazards’, it ignores about the dangers of agent orange, etc.
• The public schools don’t work. Abandon them. Let’s have private schools only.
• We have let the advocates of permissiveness, fuzzy thinking and rampant socialism destroy what was once a great educational system.
• The school system has enough money. The problem is that the white males, usually coaches, who run the schools would never (and I mean never) hire an intellectual... They care more about the football team than the curriculum and hire