The thread on Ben Stein’s new movie in the Pit got me thinking about science class.
Did anyone here ever have a discussion in any science class about the philosophical implications of any topic and specifically the philosophical implications of evolution?
I do not think I ever had a teacher or professor in any science class talk about the philosophical implications of anything. We learned about the mechanics of physical processes, not what these processes said (did not say) about whether God exists or anything like that.
I recall having the terms theory and hypothesis explained, in addition to the difference between them and what counted as scientific evidence. These are philosophical issues, and ones that deserve more emphasis. To be honest, I’m not sure we got an explicit treatment of evolution – I have difficulty separating my two high school biology classes from my university biology and philosophy courses.
Since I’m french, my experience is going to be different. In high school, we were taght philosophy of sciences in philosophy classes. Actually, since I was in the “mathematics and phyics” section in high school, a large part of philosophy courses was decicaced to epistemology.
And I do believe that epistemology belongs to the philosophy class, not to the science class.
My high school biology teacher assigned weekly “Friday essays”, asking us to comment on various controversies relating to biology. Topics included how should we decide who gets organ transplants, should a man be compensated if his gall bladder proves useful in medical research, and so forth. There were some good discussions in that class.
At the school where I currently teach, I know that the biology teacher assigns one book which argues from the perspective of intelligent design. She told me that she tried to have a discussion of the philosophical aspects of evolution, but the students didn’t have much to say.
At my schools, they shied away from any controversy. The biology classes taught “this is how your circulatory system works” and “this is how you tell the difference between a reptile and a mammal” but stayed away from any discussion of creation vs evolution. The geography lessons taught plate tectonics and such, but did not go into the implications of those concepts.
On the bright side, the school libraries were well-stocked, so if you wanted to learn about evolution, you could easily do it yourself.
>And I do believe that epistemology belongs to the philosophy class, not to the science class.
This, I think, is the necessary and sufficient guiding principle that ought to drive the development of a curriculum.
The only thing I remember hearing in a science class relevant to “what these processes said (did not say) about whether God exists or anything like that” was in 10th grade biology class, where the teacher commented that in his belief evolution was obviously a real mechanism, and this was consistent with there being a God, and the teacher could imagine no more splendid a way for God to have created all the species than by creating the framework of evolution to conduct this creation in.
This was 1973 in a Quaker boarding school in the US.
Same here, we were simply taught the mechanics. Although I do remember during freshmen orientation in high school some beastly redneck woman asked if we would be learning about evolution. The teacher said that it was a theory and he would teach it as a theory, and I’m not sure if he meant theory in the scientific sense (it’s a working model and our best explanation) or in the ID sense (it’s nothing but a guess, dur hurr hurr), because he never taught it at all.
Incidentally, her kid didn’t believe in dinosaurs, so I doubt he would have benefited anyway.