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Active Citizenship > Citizenship and the Sciences
Citizenship and the Sciences
A roundtable discussion featuring Daniel Goleman,
Ian Ayers, David Sloan Wilson, and David P. Barash
We recently asked four leading
authors—who are also educators—to answer some tough
and timely questions on the relationship between citizenship and
the sciences. Some of the questions and answers were quite provocative—such
as those involving evolutionary theory, politics and the classroom—and
others were quite illuminating and instructive—such as what
kind of advice these authors would offer new teachers to help
them better teach and connect with their students.
Why is an understanding of the sciences integral to
citizenship?
Dan Goleman (author of Emotional
Intelligence and Social
Intelligence): The scientific method offers students
a rigorous model for how to think about problems in life—not
just logical, but systematic in asking questions, gathering information,
and finding ways to evaluate answers. Sound decision-making lies
at the heart of good citizenship.
Ian Ayres (author of Super
Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart):
In today’s world citizens need to at least be knowledgeable
consumers of statistics in order to be able to evaluate critically
what politicians and pundits are claiming. If it’s all fuzzy
math to you, you’ll never be able to know whether letting
teachers carry guns is likely to increase or decrease the chance
of a Virginia Tech massacre or the extent to which carbon emissions
contribute to global warming. There’s an important difference
between truth and what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.”
David P. Barash (author of Madame
Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature):
Science has come so far that it is difficult to find areas in
which it is NOT integral to public policy and decision-making.
Just consider global warming, environmental and resource matters
of all sorts, debates over cloning and abortion and, of course,
issues of weapons of mass destruction. Evolution—my special
concern and interest—has not only been actively debated
in the public sphere when it comes to matters of educational policy
(for example, controversies over “intelligent design”),
but it also has direct implications for questions of animal rights,
human rights, racism and other misuses of evolutionary biology,
including even questions of consciousness and implications of
recent advances in genomics. Don’t misunderstand: it isn’t
necessary for everyone to become a scientist in order to be a
responsible citizen, but it is highly desirable—moreso than
ever before—for people to nurture a reasonable familiarity
with basic principles and ways of scientific thought. The good
news is that achieving basic scientific literacy needn’t
be a chore; in fact, it’s great fun!
What are ways in which teachers can help to make cross-disciplinary
links between science and fields important to building citizenship,
such as the Language Arts and Social Studies?
Ian Ayres: Teachers should get students involved
in collecting data about the world. A couple of years ago, two
economists responded to want ads in the Boston Globe and Chicago
Tribune by sending back résumés that were identical
except for the name of the applicant. At random, some employers
received résumés with African American-sounding
names and others received résumés with Caucasian-sounding
names. The simple test was just to look at the response rate (applicants
with African American-sounding names had a lot fewer responses).
The point about this study is that any high school or college
student could have done it—with just a little help from
a teacher. There’s all kinds of questions about how people
behave and how they feel that are critically important for policy
making. The best way to help students see the links between social
science and the real world is to have students go out and do some
real-world testing.
David Sloan Wilson (author of Evolution
for Everyone): Before Darwin, the biological sciences
consisted of many isolated disciplines that were difficult to
cross. After Darwin, these disciplines became easy to cross because
all of them could be understood in terms of a common set of ideas.
That is why he referred to his theory as “one long argument.”
Only recently has evolutionary theory expanded beyond the biological
sciences to include human-related disciplines such as psychology,
anthropology, economics, political science, social studies, and
even art and literature. Scientists who approach these subjects
from an evolutionary perspective find it easy to cross disciplinary
boundaries. The whole point of my book is to accomplish the same
transformation for the general public.
David P. Barash: In the case of our book, Madame
Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature, Nellie
Barash and I took some of the most beloved works of literature
and showed how they can be appreciated afresh by seeing them through
an evolutionary lens. It turns out that literature and evolution,
which may seem to be far removed from each other, are actually
closely connected in that even a superficial familiarity with
the latter can open up new realms of appreciation when it comes
to the former. Evolution is too important, and too much fun, to
be left to the evolutionists! It applies with great force to pretty
much anything people do or have done, definitely including their
imaginative storytelling.
Dan Goleman: The fundamental building blocks
of good citizenship are personal skills like self-awareness and
self-discipline, empathy and cooperation. These human abilities
allow an individual to act as a good citizen. At the neural level,
these emotional and social intelligence skills become ingrained
in the brain circuitry of students: the circuits for self-reflection
and managing emotions well, for understanding others and getting
along, are all taking shape into a person’s early twenties.
The school years are a major window on this development, and every
sustained encounter adds to the neural development, for better
or worse. Any time a teacher interacts with a student, all the
other students in the room take away a model, for better or worse.
In addition, the content of a course like Language Arts or Social
Studies can itself aid in healthy maturation for good citizenship
by embodying lessons—stories of exemplary people, for example—that
reinforce these human skills by offering a positive model for
behavior. There are off-the-shelf lesson plans in Language Arts
and Social Studies (and even math, for that matter) that are designed
precisely to have this impact on students’ citizenship abilities.
They are part of the movement in “social/emotional learning.”
What does the debate over evolution and intelligent
design say to you about the current state of affairs in education?
Please weigh in on these debates.
David Sloan Wilson: There is very little scientific
substance to the intelligent design debate, as the trial in Dover,
Pennsylvania made clear. The key to increasing acceptance of evolution
is to focus on implications in addition to facts. A threatening
idea is like any other kind of threat: the first impulse is to
run away or stamp it out. Make the same idea alluring and the
first impulse is to embrace it. In the college courses that I
teach, I show how evolutionary theory provides a powerful tool
for understanding and improving the world without threatening
basic values. Students respond by becoming enthusiastic about
evolutionary theory and losing interest in nonexplanatory theories
such as creationism and intelligent design. I am confident that
evolutionary theory can become rapidly accepted by the general
public, once we focus on implications in addition to facts.
David P. Barash: Sadly, it says that we—evolutionists
in particular and educators in general—have our work cut
out for us! The good news, however, is that (although it may sound
like a cliché) we have logic and truth on our side. Not
only that, but the realities of evolution are great fun to explore,
and, moreover, they don’t require deep mathematical or technical
sophistication. Plain old-fashioned intellectual honesty and curiosity
are more than enough. Edmund Burke once noted that the only thing
needed for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
Whereas the promoters of intelligent design aren’t necessarily
evil, they are certainly naïve, ignorant and often intellectually
dishonest, and whereas evolutionists aren’t necessarily
paragons of goodness and decency, there can be no doubt that they
have wisdom and scientific validity on their side. I suspect that—at
last—there is a new wind blowing in America, not only when
it comes to the periodic swinging of the political pendulum, but
also regarding respect for intellectual and scientific integrity.
Our job as educators is to make science not only palatable but
to share its thrills and delights.
What does science offer us in terms of under-standing
human relations and even politics?
Ian Ayres: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
said the life of the law has been experience. He meant that if
you want to know what the law really is you need to know how judges
are going to decide real cases. The empirical approach is uncovering
the hidden levers of human behavior—in politics and society
more generally. Want to know whether prison hardens or rehabilitates
prisoners? For centuries, politicians have argued back and forth
on this one. But theory can’t tell you the answer. Instead
a quasi-randomized experiment of real prisoners shows that both
sides in the debate are wrong. Prison doesn’t really increase
or decrease the chance that released inmates will go out and commit
another crime. Prisoners who at random were assigned to “hanging”
judges had the same recidivism rate as those assigned to bleeding-heart
judges. Want to know the impact of term limits or campaign contribution
limits on how legislators vote? You better run a statistical test.
Want to know whether Justice Alito is more likely to drift to
the right or to the left in his future Supreme Court decisions?
Statistically studying what causes ideological drift in the past
is a good place to start. Justice Holmes was dead-on when he said
“the man of the future is the man of statistics.”
I would simply extend this to include women.
David Sloan Wilson: It is interesting that theories
in the human-related sciences, such as rational choice theory
or general learning theory, were never envisioned as alternatives
to evolutionary theory. Few rational choice theorists are young
earth creationists. When pressed to explain why people are designed
to maximize their own utilities, most would probably cheerfully
speculate that the ability evolved by genetic evolution. In this
fashion, they rely upon evolution to explain their own assumptions,
but then proceed without much knowledge about evolution. In retrospect,
it is obvious that a sophisticated knowledge of genetic and cultural
evolutionary processes is required to understand human relations
and, yes—even politics.
Considering your research, speaking engagements, and
your own reading, if you could offer one piece of advice or information
to today’s teachers, what would that be?
David Sloan Wilson: Here is a passage from the
end of Evolution for Everyone: “I sometimes wonder
what it must have been like to be present during the early days
of Darwin’s theory, when the idea was so new and so much
remained to be discovered. Then I realize that I am present during
the early days of Darwin’s theory. The intellectual events
taking place right now are as foundational as 100 and 150 years
ago. How amazing that virtually anyone can partake in the excitement,
as an observer or participant, as I hope you have seen on the
basis of this book.” My advice for today’s teachers
to learn about these developments, not only from my book but from
many other wonderful and accessible books on evolution as a theory
that can explain the human condition in addition to the rest of
the natural world.
Dan Goleman: Tune in to your students’
world—their feelings, their way of understanding, their
concerns. This will let you teach and interact with them in a
way that will resonate and engage—a direct antidote to the
pulls in their lives to disengage from learning. Remember the
distinction between an “I-You” communication and an
“I-It”: in the “You,” the speaker attunes
to how the listener reacts, and adjusts what she says and does
accordingly; this establishes an emotional link between teacher
and student. In the “It,” the speaker treats the listener
as an object, communicating in a bullet-like, automatic way that
leaves students cold. Creating a relaxed, connected warmth in
the classroom sets the neural stage for students to learn at their
best.
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