Science is hard. Will get harder. Learn to deal with it!

Throughout my early years in school, math and the sciences came naturally to me and I found the subjects to be absolutely wonderful as well.  Decades later, a classmate, "S," recalled how I had helped him with calculus, and much to my disappointment I had/have no memories of that.  But, I can easily imagine having helped him because those were topics that I could have dealt with even in my sleep!

My heart and emotions were not in the math and sciences, however, and slowly I drifted away from that part of the intellectual world.

After I returned to academe as a faculty--this was in California--I once organized a term-long series on introducing freshman students to various intellectual pursuits.  One week, it was an English professor who came over to talk with the students.  Very fashionably did she sit on the table, as opposed to on the chair, and in her remarks emphasized to students how much she didn't get math when she was in high school and college, and didn't get it even as an older adult, and that it really didn't matter because, well, she was a professor.  Her message to the students was, well, don't sweat the math!

I was shocked that she would so actively encourage impressionable freshmen to stop worrying about math and sciences if they didn't get them or weren't interested in them.

Turned out that she was not the only faculty to talk to students that way.  Over the years, I have come to feel that most faculty outside the sciences have actively made sure that students feel legitimized about not wanting to do science or math.

And then there is the whole GPA issue.  Students know really, really, well that they can easily boost their GPAs if they took as minimal as possible courses in the sciences and math.

The pursuit of the perfect GPA is a distraction that leads too many students away from the challenges they should be facing in their undergraduate years. At a time when public understanding of science is critical, fewer and fewer non-majors are taking demanding science courses, due at least in part to their fear of getting penalized for their efforts with a less than stellar grade.

Thus, we end up graduating students with high GPAs, making sure that all students being above-average is not merely the case in a fictional Lake Wobegon!  Commencement ceremonies now routinely have magna- and summa-cum-laudes by the dozens--of course, very, very few of them from math and science, and nobody seems to even acknowledge that!  Once, when I participated in the university's deliberations on choosing the outstanding graduates, I made a mistake of commenting that it would not be fair to compare GPAs of students who were in different majors; I was surprised that there was no discussion on that point. Keep ignoring and eventually people like me will go away, I suppose!  It worked--it has been years since I participated in those discussions.

It is not merely a CP Snow kind of worry I have about the decreasing emphasis on science.  That is certainly a worry.  Of even more concern is the message we convey to students--find easy ways out, and don't struggle with things that are hard.

Such a message is the worst education we can ever provide.  Students don't even realize how much we are shortchanging their lives this way.  That message is the worst return on their investment.

Through education, which is more than a paper diploma, we would hope that students understand that life is a long haul, with quite a few complexities that they will have to deal with individually and as members of society.  The struggles in the classroom are more than merely about the subject content, and are metaphors for life.  Life is no cakewalk and is bloody hard in so many different ways.

If they can fight their way to the truth, the truth will make them free, just as it did for me that day in high school physics.
What is true for science is also true for the other great human endeavors.
To engage with the world in search of any kind of Truth is an expression of the search for excellence. That, by its very nature, is desperately difficult. There will always be a price to be paid in time, sweat and tears. We should never sugarcoat that reality.

Beyond all these, think about the implications for public policies.  A citizenry that is not educated in the sciences is a nightmare that we are already living through.  A classic example is the paranoia over GM crops.    That is also the example that is the point of departure in this essay, where the author is concerned about irrationality holding back good science:

What lies at the root of this panic, and others like it? One factor that is often ignored by champions of reason is that science is hard, and getting harder. In the mid-19th century, the ideas of British naturalists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace took hold in part because they were so simple and intuitive (and in part because Darwin was such a clear writer). In those days, it was just about possible for an educated layman to get a grip on the cutting edges of science, medicine and technology. The same feat would be laughably impossible today. 

The more science becomes difficult to understand, the easier it is to grab a hold of "alternative" explanations:

It is hard to become a molecular biologist, or a doctor, or an engineer. Yet it is relatively easy to grasp the ‘precautionary principle’ — the belief that, in the absence of scientific proof that something is harmless, we must assume that it is harmful.

Yes, because it is easier to play this game, we then have an increasing population of reactionaries.  Conservatives in an unscientific way.  Things have gone so bad that:

Scientists are distrusted in a way they were not 100 years ago. The whole scientific enterprise looks to many like some sort of sinister conspiracy, created by the industrial establishment to make money at the expense of our health and our planet. ‘Science’ (rather than greed, incompetence, laziness or simple expediency) gets blamed for the degradation of our environment, pollution and threats to species. 

As the essay points out, if the early humans had adopted such a reactionary approach, fire and the wheel would have been banned even before they were adopted!

Oh well ... I will keep ranting away, though nobody listens to me, ever ;)

At the (new) biology lab at my old school, during the class reunion after 30 years