Countdown to school: looking at science with Ruth Beechick

It's three weeks till school starts.

I'm looking at the chapter on "Science and Health" in Ruth Beechick's You CAN Teach Your Child Successfully, Grades 4-8.  Ruth Beechick, if you're too young to remember, is one of the homeschool grandmas of "common sense learning."  She teaches a very conservative view of young-earth Creation, but even those who disagree with that may find she makes some good points in this chapter.

"This last point is the second fallacy of the 'strict textbook' thinking.  For high success we must take into account the way people learn.  The textbook style of science learning is traditional in our schools, and research is showing that as students progress through the grades they like science less and less, until after grade 12 only 10% still give 'attention' to science.  The other 90% are considered scientifically illiterate."

Ouch.

Dr. Beechick doesn't give footnotes or sources for her statistics, but I'd guess that current research (twenty years later, since she says she was writing in 1993) would probably back up the general idea of what's she's saying.

"Research into the causes has shown that students, especially in high school, perceive books and teachers as 'knowing' science and as 'answer givers.'  This progressively turns off students' own curiosity, motivation, and interest in the subject....So as teacher, you do not have to be an 'answer giver.'  That should take pressure off practically all of us, since only a few science professionals probably feel qualified to take that role."

She also makes this important point:

"Is it science that will improve the lot of mankind?  Will science literacy for all citizens lead to better decisions?....The world may need better scientists and a nation may need citizens who are scientifically literate, but far more do we need leaders and citizens in the moral and religious realms.  With that we would make better use of our science knowledge."

She refers to a project that was in progress at that time:  the NRC (National Research Council) national science education standards of 1996.  Writing in 1993, Dr. Beechick considered it "the greatest effort ever toward reaching a national consensus on what children should learn in school science."  The basic idea sounded good: get students more interested, more involved, give them more ownership over their science learning, let them design their own science experiments, let them think about the "why" of science. I do not know what she said about the NRC standards afterwards:  it turned out to be one of the "outcomes-based" educational initiatives of the '90's that left homeschoolers and other educators either scratching their heads in bewilderment or pulling their hair in frustration (Plutarch might say eating their fingers).  In other words, the same stuff happened to science teaching in the American public schools as happened to math and English.

How does knowing all that help us, or not help us?

Well, we can still take what Dr. Beechick felt was good about the move towards a more human, maybe more holistic understanding of science, even if its public-school application turned out to be a turkey.  While recognizing the limits and the dangers of worshipping science, she wanted her students to finish school at least "liking science." ("How much does he care?")  She seemed to like the idea of including the philosophy, history and sociology of science in the curriculum, along with the more facts-based material.  You can sprout beans, study volcanoes, melt and freeze things all you want in science class, but there has to be a reason behind it.

Next time I'll post about what the science plans are for the fall.  (Hint: it involved the World Book Typical Course of Study.  Another hint: it turned out to be more or less what we were already doing.)

Terrible Lizard, by Deborah Cadbury (book review)

I had mentioned that I was reading Terrible Lizard, but hadn't posted much about what I learned or whether it was a good book.

Yes, it is an excellent book. In fact, I would say that if you want to understand where Charlotte Mason and her PNEU cohorts were coming from in their views of the natural world, this is essential reading. It covers the whole digging-up-dinosaurs-in-Britain story from Mary Anning's discoveries around 1810 to the huge shift in thinking fifty years later. It connects geology and anatomy...and, more exactly, geologists and anatomists...with the race to identify, name, and take credit for the new/old creatures. The story starts with a poverty-stricken girl digging up bones, and an aspiring geologist puzzling over a tooth that just had to belong to an herbivore but didn't fit any known category of creature. It peaks with an 1850's dinner party inside a model Iguanodon. It ends with people looking towards the established heads of science, those who had always come up with Biblically-acceptable answers, to respond to Darwin and Huxley...and those same sources of knowledge and faith finally throwing up their hands.

Actually Darwin and Huxley play only a small part in this story--they were the rebels who took over from the previous generation of geologists. Geology was a sort of gentleman's science in the first half of the nineteenth century; if you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to be a member of the Geological Society. The pre-Darwin British geologists were careful to present their findings in a God-inspired, Biblical context; some of them, like William Buckland, held high positions in the Church of England; few of them agreed with "evolution," but they were finding themselves believing less and less in a literal six days of creation, in a worldwide deluge, and in a world that was only a few thousand years old. The stories they read in the rocks and the bones seemed to show without any question that the large creatures must have existed in a time before man--perhaps in a whole other time that God had also created.

And then the evolutionists came along and took even that away.

"When he met Darwin in December 1859, [Richard]Owen praised him for his original ideas on the formation of species. Owen did not accept that Man was a transmuted ape, but in the Origin Darwin had only hinted at Man's relationship with apes. He was eager to build bridges with the famous anatomist, and it is possible that Owen may have imagined that there was some common ground between them: each step in Darwin's evolution could still be planned by God."--Cadbury, page 307

But it didn't work out that way.

"[In 1860, Thomas Huxley] discussed Man's relationship to the apes, highlighting similarities. Owen was furious; had always sought to show that Man was zoologically distinct from the animals. Those seeking to reconcile the findings of science with their belief in the Bible faced a terrible dilemma. How could the 'monkey theory' fit with Creation in Genesis? Owen was the obvious scientific leader who could surely be relied upon to expose the flaws in Darwin's thinking....[but] Owen could no longer shelter behind the ambiguous language he had used for so long....Even though Owen was not a Creationist the sides became polarised, with Darwin and his supporters, 'the Devil's Disciples' Huxley and Hooker, standing in opposition to Owen, who was trying to uphold traditional values....One by one, Owen's cherished notions on the dinosaurs were seen to fall apart."--Cadbury, pages 307-317

There are other fascinating people in this story--Gideon Mantell, the doctor and geologist who puzzled over the herbivore's tooth; Charles Lyell, who had a strong influence in moving scientific beliefs away from having to agree with the Bible; Georges Cuvier. And Mary Anning, who never got enough credit or enough compensation.

But for me the most interesting aspect of the book--aside from the actual dinosaur discoveries--was the clear presentation of how Creationist Christianity was suddenly left in the lurch. I don't have good answers for that even now. I don't know if I could have handled this book twenty years ago, or if I would have wanted to read anything at all where the "good guys" didn't believe that it all happened exactly as the Bible said. Today Christians who don't want to "leave their brains at the door" are being offered Creationist research to consider that was not available then. I'd like to believe all the young-earth-creationist material, because the fact that God made us in his image--really made us--is as central to our beliefs as it was to Buckland and Owen. However, I did not grow up with the idea that men and dinosaurs co-existed, so I have as hard a time trying to fit that all together as they did their piles of bones. I'm trying to keep an open mind on both sides.

Anyway--a very good read, very worthwhile especially for high school students. There are only two places I could see that you might want to have them skip over--an early adventure of Owen's involving body parts, and some other graphic material on page 270.