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Science, Worldviews and Education: An Introduction

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Abstract

This special issue of Science & Education deals with the theme of ‘Science, Worldviews and Education’. The theme is of particular importance at the present time as many national and provincial education authorities are requiring that students learn about the Nature of Science (NOS) as well as learning science content knowledge and process skills. NOS topics are being written into national and provincial curricula. Such NOS matters give rise to questions about science and worldviews: What is a worldview? Does science have a worldview? Are there specific ontological, epistemological and ethical prerequisites for the conduct of science? Does science lack a worldview but nevertheless have implications for worldviews? How can scientific worldviews be reconciled with seemingly discordant religious and cultural worldviews? In addition to this major curricular impetus for refining understanding of science and worldviews, there are also pressing cultural and social forces that give prominence to questions about science, worldviews and education. There is something of an avalanche of popular literature on the subject that teachers and students are variously engaged by. Additionally the modernisation and science-based industrialisation of huge non-Western populations whose traditional religions and beliefs are different from those that have been associated with orthodox science, make very pressing the questions of whether, and how, science is committed to particular worldviews. Hugh Gauch Jr. provides a long and extensive lead essay in the volume, and 12 philosophers, educators, scientists and theologians having read his paper, then engage with the theme. Hopefully the special issue will contribute to a more informed understanding of the relationship between science, worldviews and education, and provide assistance to teachers who are routinely engaged with the subject.

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Notes

  1. The legislation recognised the arguments of the Great Ape Project (www.greatapeproject.org).

  2. A classic discussion is Dijksterhuis’s The Mechanization of the World Picture (1961).

  3. A good overview, with references, can be found in Dewitt (2004).

  4. Texts, and some discussion, can be found in Matthews (1989). See also Gjertsen (1989).

  5. See Friedman (1992).

  6. See contributions to Cohen and Seeger (1970).

  7. For ‘official’ philosophy in the Soviet Union see Graham (1973); for ‘sanctioned’ philosophy in the Catholic Church see McInerny (1966) and Weisheipl (1968).

  8. This is the view advocated by, among others, Aikenhead (1996, 2000).

  9. This lack of training in foundation disciplines, including also psychology, is depressingly documented in Fensham (2004).

  10. See contributions to Kurtz and Madigan (1994) and Koertge (1998).

  11. One useful ‘opinionated guide to the wars’ is Brown (2001).

  12. The engagement of Hinduism with science is elaborated in Nanda (2003), Islam and science in Edis (2007).

  13. See, for instance, the now slightly-dated analysis in McComas and Olson (1998).

  14. See contributions to Duschl and Grandy (2008) and Flick and Lederman (2004).

  15. The survey was conducted between May and August 2007, and published in June 2008 in the Pew Report at www.pewreport.org.

  16. Excepting that God needs to keep an account of what has gone on in the world, and there needs to be some principle of individual identity—usually a soul—so that what survives into the next life, or what is reborn there, can be identified with the individual in this life.

  17. International Herald Tribune, 11 July 2008, p. 3.

  18. A 1990 Gallup poll of 1,236 adults in the USA recorded 52% believed in astrology, 42% had communicated with the dead, and 35% believed in ghosts. On this whole subject see Shermer (1997).

  19. Guardian News and Media, 28 July 2008.

  20. Although often confused, there is a difference between Realism and Naturalism (including Materialism). Realism simply asserts that there is a world independent of human thought. Such an independent world might include spirits, minds, universals, Forms, or any other independent existent. Realism neither rules in or out any particular ontology. Naturalism is a subspecies of Realism, Materialism in turn is a subspecies of Naturalism.

  21. On naturalism see Nagel (1956).

  22. This was Lenin’s argument against supposed idealist movements in early 20th-century science and philosophy (Lenin 1920/1970). On the history and philosophy of materialism see Vitzthum (1995).

  23. On emergent materialism see Broad (1925), Sellars (1932) and Bunge (1973, 1981).

  24. Cobern (1991, 1996) canvasses much of the literature on this last matter.

  25. An informative account of the history of these interactions is J.D. Bernal’s classic four volume study Science in History (1965).

  26. Collingwood supported realism against the then fashionable idealist and constructivist positions that he had earlier held. He criticised the then enormously popular English physicists Arthur Eddington and James Jeans because they gave phenomenalist and subjectivist renderings of the scientific worldview (Collingwood 1945, p. 157).

  27. On this aspect of Collingwood, see Donagan (1962). The classic treatment of the role of presuppositions in science is Pap (1946), published at the same time as Collingwood’s work.

  28. Reasonable collections of primary texts of the Scientific Revolution can be found in Boas Hall (1970) and Oster (2002).

  29. For selections of important Enlightenment texts see Gay (1973), Eliot and Stern (1979), Kramnick (1995) and Hyland et al. (2003). The classic supportive discussion of the Enlightenment is Peter Gay’s two volume study (Gay 1970, 1977); the classic critical discussion is Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/1972). For comprehensive and less polarised analysis see Porter (2000) and Israel (2001). Among numerous good treatments of the Enlightenment and its relationship to the Scientific Revolution, see Dupré (2004), Hankins (1985) and contributions to Fitzpatrick et al. (2007).

  30. Sympathetic accounts of the positive role of religion in the development of Western science can be found in Brooke (1991) and Jaki (1978).

  31. The conceptual nexus between ethics and education is developed in Peters (1966).

  32. Three current prime examples would be Afghanistan under the Taliban, Saudi Arabia under the domination of its Wahhabi-Sunni monarch and aristocracy and North Korea; but there are many sub-prime examples.

  33. The notion of a society promoting universal flourishing is of course an Enlightenment and normative idea; it is rejected by numerous political regimes, religions and indigenous societies in which one’s gender, class, caste, belief, political affiliation can put people outside the group of those who are to flourish.

  34. See Lederman (1992), McComas (1998a), contributions to special issues of Science & Education (vol. 6, no. 4, 1997; vol. 7, no. 6, 1998), and contributions to McComas (1998b) and Flick and Lederman (2004).

  35. The Lederman group, for example, are realists about the world, but it is very unclear whether they are realists about science’s theoretical entities. It is not the reality of the world that teachers need guidance about, it is the reality or otherwise of entities postulated in scientific theories. On this matter the Lederman group is simply ambiguous. Utilising the philosophical distinction between theoretical terms as ‘intervening variables’ and as ‘hypothetical constructs’ (Meehl and MacCorquodale 1948) would go a long way to clarifying this ambiguity.

  36. For an account of these ‘alphabet’ curricula, and related research, see Matthews (1994, pp. 15–20), DeBoer (1991, Chap. 8) and Rudolph (2002).

  37. It is useful to distinguish scientific method which refers to practical technique or how one collects data and takes measurements, from scientific methodology, which refers to intellectual analysis or what one does with data once it is collected. Methodology refers to how data or information bears upon the truth, or otherwise, of hypotheses tested or theories held. For example, how does the sighting of 20 white swans bear upon the hypothesis that all swans are white? Some of the major methodological options that have been advanced by philosophers of science have been Inductivism, Falsificationism, and Research Programme Appraisal. For an account of the variety of such methodological positions see Nola and Sankey (2000).

  38. On the terminology and its application, see Roberts (1982).

  39. On the educational philosophy of Harvard Project Physics, see Holton (1978); for the vicissitudes of its history, see Holton (2003).

  40. For texts exemplifying these wider or cultural goals of science education, see Rutherford et al. (1970), Holton (1952), Arons (1990), Holton and Brush (2001) and Cushing (1998).

  41. For something of the history of this curricular struggle, see Matthews (1994, Chap. 2) and Rudolph (2002).

  42. Because the two events—the rising sun and the increasing length of a stick’s shadow—are constantly joined, on Humean grounds we can choose either to be the cause.

  43. His review did not include the Edis essay as it was a late invitation to the special issue.

  44. This is Joseph Schwab’s expression, inspired by Dewey (Schwab 1962).

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  1. School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052, Australia

    Michael R. Matthews

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Matthews, M.R. Science, Worldviews and Education: An Introduction. Sci & Educ 18, 641–666 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-008-9170-6

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