Connected Knowledge: Science, Philosophy, and Education

  • Alan Cromer
Oxford University Press: 1997. Pp. 221 $25, £19.99

Alan Cromer is a man with a mission. A self-described “optimistic know-it-all”, he wants US science education to shape up and abandon constructivism and other trends that he feels are not only failing to educate young Americans but are also mis-educating them. As in his earlier book, Uncommon Sense (Oxford University Press, 1993), he presents science as a non-intuitive way of knowing about phenomena whose causes are not obvious. To learn how the world works requires systematic introduction of principles that build upon one another. Scientific understanding is based on feedback between theory and experience, spiralling up to a more complete understanding of nature. He blends this philosophy of science with the teaching of science, taking us through quantum physics, the nature of the social sciences, his personal theory of human social organization, a history of education, some idiosyncratic views of learning theory, an even more idiosyncratic commentary on genetics, race, class and IQ, and finally his recommendations for reorganizing US science education.

There is no doubting Cromer's passion and dedication. He has spent several years with Project SEED, an innovative teacher-training programme, as well as developing programmes for teaching basic scientific literacy to prison inmates. He has thought carefully about what high-school graduates should know and about how to design a curriculum to achieve these objectives. His advice flies in the face of some cherished values in US education — which alone recommends the book.

Constructivism, promoted in all reform guidelines on US science education, comes in for a sound thrashing. In constructivist learning, students ‘construct’ knowledge of science by ‘discovering’ principles, especially ‘learning by exploring’. This is thought to result in deeper and more complete understanding. Critical thinking is taught through ‘open-ended problems’ with either no clear answer or many possible answers.

Wrong reasoning, says Cromer. To learn even the simplest scientific principles (he takes most of his examples from physics) requires the direction of a teacher. “In mucking about randomly, a student learns as little as a mouse does while meandering about the maze on its first trial. Only when the student reaches a goal, such as getting an experiment to agree with an equation, does the whole enterprise begin to make any sense⃛. An experienced science teacher knows that some detours are so wasteful of time and energy that students should be warned against them, whereas other byways might be left for the students to explore⃛ it may seem far-fetched to compare a student doing a physics experiment with a mouse running through a maze, but only to someone who has never taken a physics laboratory course.”

But the term ‘constructivism’ hides much variation, and I have seen some classroom teachers leading students to understanding in precisely the way Cromer recommends — and calling it constructivism. Some constructivist approaches cheerfully if mindlessly exhort the teacher to “accept all answers” instead of reminding them that the point of the exercise is to help the student to understand some principle or other. But some uses of constructivism, such as in pre-assessing a student's understanding (or misunderstanding) of a topic, are certainly worthwhile. There is a place for letting students explore, as Cromer would agree. But for a student to understand either basic principles of science or how science works, the guidance of a teacher is necessary because “without knowledgeable guidance from their teacher, students are truly like mice in a maze. Each will arrive at his own version of the goal with his own set of errors and misconceptions.” What is dismal about US education is that most teachers do not understand enough about basic science to be able to supervise such explorations properly, whether called constructivist or something else.

So what is Cromer's solution? We must, he says, agree on what high-school graduates should know about science and then develop a coherent curriculum to produce students who have this knowledge. Cromer criticizes the US National Science Education Standards for not accomplishing this task and being laden with educational gobbledegook. A de facto set of ideas and skills already exists, he says, in the ‘General Educational Development’ test, or GED, a rigorous seven-hour high-school equivalency test of language skills, social studies science and mathematics given to adults. A pass in GED or a high-school diploma is required in the United States to attend college or technical school or to apply for most jobs. A novel idea is to have all ninth-graders take GED before they can go on to the final three years of high school — or leave school or go into a training programme. “It is vitally important that there be a meaningful intermediate certificate to provide young people with an honorable way to leave school after ninth or tenth grade. The drive to push everyone through twelve years of academic study has made ‘drop outs’ of those who are unable or unwilling to do so.”

To ensure all students get at least to the GED level will require another unfashionable idea — ability grouping, in which students are grouped by their ability to perform certain tasks. Cromer does not intend this to be ‘tracking’, where students are permanently assigned to high, medium or low IQ groups, but a looser, less-permanent grouping that students can move in and out of as their skills and knowledge improve. He believes ability grouping is especially important if low-achieving students are to meet the minimal GED-type standards, because these students need special attention to develop even the most basic understanding.

Cromer enjoys the role of curmudgeon, and the forceful way in which he writes cannot help but engage the reader. (Speaking of criticisms of intelligence testing, he growls: “There are few educators who know enough arithmetic to balance a checkbook, let alone understand a multivariant logistic regression analysis”.) But this leads to the occasional overstatement that frustrates or annoys. His physics is better than his social science and history. A chapter explaining why the uncertainty and indeterminacy of quantum mechanics makes the visible world in which we live certain and determined is an excellent antidote to postmodernists' claims about the lack of objective reality and the supposed inability of science to explain it. His discussion of intelligence is better than his discussion of race: as a physical anthropologist, I was dismayed by his confusion of the concept of equality with that of identicalness (the former social and legal construct is independent of the latter biological one). He combines the principles of natural selection with observations of animal and human behaviour to produce a new theory of human social organization. Here the yin of hierarchy and loyalty was selected with the yang of individualism and rebelliousness as adaptive traits in early human social environments. Although I am generally sympathetic to sociobiological and evolutionary approaches, I did not find the discussion fully persuasive.

But these are minor glitches in what is certainly a stimulating and thought-provoking book. Although the hats on the good guys and the bad guys are perhaps both whiter and blacker than in reality, one should definitely consider Cromer's analysis. There is a lot to be said for systematically teaching science from the part to the whole.