Science education

Joule's apparatus

I am now going to make you a gift that will stay with you the rest of your life. For the rest of your life, every time you say “we’ve always done it that way,” my ghost will appear and haunt you for twenty-four hours.
— Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992).

“A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone. If your wish is to become really a man of science and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics.”
— Waldman, the teacher of young Frankenstein, in Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 – 1851).

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life;- to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?
— Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862).

Contrast this situation with that in at least the contemporary natural sciences. In these fields the student relies mainly on textbooks until, in his third or fourth year of graduate work, he begins his own research. Many science curricula do not ask even graduate students to read in works not written specially for students.
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, 165.

On Jan. 13, 1920, “Topics of the Times”, an editorial-page feature of the New York Times, dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum and commented on the ideas of Robert H. Goddard, the rocket pioneer, as follows:

“That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction , and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge handed out daily in high schools.”

Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton  in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.
— New York Times , July 17, 1969, 43.

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