|
|
|
| Sputnik and Science Education (continued) Perhaps those examples are sufficient to support my claim that the Sputnik reforms in science education were substantial. It was a good investment and not a grand failure, as some would have it. Why then are we not farther along? What did we learn that might help us do better this time. Lesson 1. Reform must focus on the attainment of long-term educational goals, not on solving the crisis of the moment. The Sputnik cold-war challenge was for the United States to become dominant in space, which soon came to be to get a man to the moon first. We did—and there went our motivation (of the time) for serious (and expensive and frustrating) educational reform. This time the motivation seems to be international trade competition and international education test contests. What happens when we “win” those? Will we again doze off, or have we learned our Sputnik lesson? Now that we have National Science Education Standards, we have challenge enough to focus our efforts on for the next few decades. Lesson 2. We stopped too soon! The Sputnik effort play out after about 15 years and was followed by 15 years of inaction. A critical mass of change had not had time to become institutionalized, and the long hiatus allowed us to slip back to earlier practices and materials—and gave the doubters reason to claim failure. Anything as massive and as complex as schooling in America simply cannot be changed in a hurry. There are no quick and easy and inexpensive fixes available. Decades of concerted, unrelenting effort will still be needed. Lesson 3. The federal government has a crucial role in reform and needs to stay in the game. As the Sputnik effort faded away, we discovered, to the dismay of many of us, that few states or local school districts were prepared to pick up the tab for underwriting research and development, continuing the training opportunities for teachers of science, providing modern science teaching materials, and employing science specialists in the elementary schools. Without such support, reform is wishful thinking. Lesson 4. Our effort must continue to be construed to include all students. At the start of the Sputnik episode, the nation set out to accelerate the production of first-rate scientists and engineers, but as it became clear that that could not be achieved without the existence of a large pool of well-educated and science-interested students in the schools, the base of the effort gradually broadened. What the nation needed in 1957 and what it needs now is schools whose graduates are able to come to terms with the scientific and technological realities that will confront them daily—as citizens, as workers, as human beings. Science for All Americans must not be allowed to become an empty slogan. |
[Home] [Directories] [Publications] [Search] [Site Map] [About] [President's Corner] [Employment] [Browse] [Feedback] |
Copyright 1997 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. |