We've all heard this before, and many of us have experienced it firsthand: Science class is boring. It's too hard. It's not fun. It's all about memorizing a bunch of formulas. The teacher is too tough. Homework is stupid and pointless. The list goes on. Of course, there are spectacular exceptions, truly motivating and inspiring science teachers across the world. One or two of these mentors were essential to many of us who became professional scientists. What do they have that other teachers don't? What makes a good science teacher? There is pedagogy, of course. How you present the material, how you relate to your students. But first and foremost, it is passion that makes a science teacher stand out, or any teacher for that matter. Passion for the subject matter, passion for teaching, passion for making a difference and becoming someone unique in the lives of the many young people the teacher meets in the classroom. A successful teacher never steps outside of his own humanity as he steps into the classroom. Quite the opposite, the act of teaching should be a celebration of our shared humanity, of our mission to pass on knowledge from generation to generation so as to keep the appetite for discovery and invention burning.

...the act of teaching should be a celebration of our shared humanity, of our mission to pass on knowledge from generation to generation so as to keep the appetite for discovery and invention burning.

There is a side to science teaching that is formulaic; there is material that needs to be covered, facts that must be introduced, there is repetition, there is frustration. No profession is different. Like in acting, however, it is the delivery that makes the difference. You can explain Newton's laws of motion by simply writing them on the blackboard (or the whiteboard or a tablet that is projected onto a big screen) and working through a few examples. This is done across the world in thousands of classrooms every day. But if this is all you do when teaching Newton's laws, you are leaving out the best part of the story, the story itself. Who was Isaac Newton? Why was he thinking about the laws of motion and gravity in his early twenties? What was going on in Europe in the mid 1600s? Was science at war with religion after Galileo's affair with the Vatican? Where was Newton when he came up with his first insights into a formulation of mechanics that would change the world forever? (Answer: hiding from a plague pandemic in his mother's farm.) What inspired him? Was he just a hardened rationalist who only cared about describing the world through formulas? (Answer: absolutely not! Yes, Newton was a weirdo, socially detached, quiet, and probably died a virgin. Still, he was far from a cold machine, only interested in calculations. What moved him was a deep religiosity, a conviction that the rationality of the world reflected God's rationality and that the task of the natural philosopher was to unveil the cosmic blueprint so as to understand better the "mind of God.") To Newton, the practice of science was an act of religious devotion.

Why deprive students of this humanistic side of science? The usual excuse is time, as in "we don't have enough time to cover the material and delve into such stories." Nonsense. I've been teaching physics courses for over 30 years at all different levels, from non-science majors to quantum field theory to graduate students, and I can guarantee that there is always time when there is the will.

The true reason why the overwhelming majority of science classes excludes the humanistic aspects inherent in the practice of science is that most scientists don't know any of this story. And they don't know it because these topics are not part of their scientific education. Those who do know, look for this knowledge largely on their own. A typical scientific education doesn't include the historical and cultural context from which the science emerged, or the spiritual and religious inspiration behind the thoughts of many of the "heroes" of science, from Johannes Kepler and Newton to James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein. And if they do know, they've been trained not to mention it. "Don't mention philosophy; don't mention history of science, and surely don't mention religion in a science class."

Over the past two centuries, and largely influenced by the profound and immediate impact of technological applications of scientific thinking in industry and society, the teaching of science was mostly reduced to the instruction of technicians, a specialized guild focused on very specific tasks. We became incredibly efficient at handling abstruse mathematics and computer programming, of modeling specific systems and handling laboratory demands within narrow subdisciplines: plasma physics, condensed-matter physics, high-energy physics, astrophysics, and so on. The walls erected between the sciences and the humanities after the Enlightenment have multiplied into walls erected between the countless subdisciplines within each scientific field, from physics and chemistry to biology and computer science. Reductionism took over education and we lost sight of the whole.

True, the vast amount of knowledge accumulated over the centuries, and that continues to grow at an unrelenting pace in all scientific fields, unavoidably precludes anyone from having a global understanding of a whole subject, be it astronomy or cognitive psychology. That is not what worries me, as I am, as are all my colleagues, one of the specialists. What does worry me is the enormous distancing between a scientific education and a humanistic approach to knowledge. From teaching Dartmouth's Physics for Poets for most of my career, I have witnessed the excitement of nonscience majors when they understand not the formulas of physics but the ideas of physics, the historical context from which they emerged, their philosophical and religious implications, the humanity of science itself, as an expression of our human need to make sense of who we are and of the world in which we live. (For those curious, I created a similar online course free and open to the public, Question Reality! Science, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning )

As students learn about changing worldviews, about the importance of observational rigor and methodological discipline, of the devotion and passion that feeds the search for knowledge and the fundamental relevance of science education in our times, they reconnect with a science they had deemed unwieldy and grow as thinkers and citizens. The challenges we face in the modern world call for an engagement of the sciences and the humanities that starts in the classroom and becomes an essential conversation in the public sphere.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Marcelo Gleiser

Science is born out of discord. This may surprise a lot of people, given that science is usually equated with "truth" and certainty. However, truth and certainty are both very elusive concepts, with meanings that change as our knowledge of the world and of ourselves changes. Put it bluntly, what was true at one time may be false at another. Worldviews change and often collide. They are colliding now, in this post-Trump era, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

The history of science offers many examples. A famous one is the Copernican Revolution, a profound reorganization of our model of the universe and our place in it, with profound historical consequences that are still unfolding. If you asked a well-educated European living in the early 1500s what the arrangement of the cosmos was, the answer would be that Earth is the center of all things and the planets and stars revolve around it in circular orbits. Man is created in God's image and has dominion over nature. That was the accepted truth, validated with the church's imprimatur: the cosmic blueprint mirrored the spiritual blueprint as spelled out in the Bible; change and decadence belonged to man and nature, while faith in God propelled the spirit to ascend to the perfect heavens above.

About a century would pass from the publication of Copernicus' book in 1543 to the growing acceptance that the old Earth-centric cosmic view had to be abandoned. The new cosmic blueprint—the Sun as the center of all things—shifted the focus away from Earth and mankind, toward the open vastness of an unknown cosmos, a new truth that shattered the link between cosmos and God. The new worldview posed a profound challenge to the believer, now unmoored from the dogmatic verticality of the medieval cosmos.

From then on, science forged a path where the world would be described through a strict materialistic perspective: atoms bouncing about, combining to form the complex structures of the world we see, from the simplest molecules to planets, stars, galaxies, and, of course, living creatures on Earth and possibly elsewhere. The more successful science became in describing nature and in facilitating the manipulation of its materials to create technologies and prosperity, the further it placed itself from the complex subjectivities of humans, which became part of the humanities and the arts. Despite much protesting from the early 19th-century Romantics, the agenda set forth by the Enlightenment placed the centrality of reason above all else. Universities, the seats of learning and knowledge creation, were divided into a proliferating number of departments, split from one another by high walls, each discipline with its own methodology and language, goals and essential questions.

It is not an accident that distrust in science is rampant in this country and others. The teaching of science boasts its separation from our humanity, relegating subjective and existential concerns as secondary.

People base their worldview on knowledge they accumulate through learning, cultural context, and life experiences. The tribes we choose to belong to (when we have this freedom) are expressions of this worldview. The Enlightenment and the consequent focus on scientific materialism left many people behind, aching for some kind of spiritual guidance. Life became objectified, as did our planet and our transactional relation to it and to other forms of life. How are we to reconcile some of the most fundamental aspects of human nature—love, loss, the need to belong—with the cold lens of deductive reasoning and data analysis?

Of course, science needs to adhere to its strict methodology in order to function. Science works and should be celebrated for its achievements. However, 400 years since Galileo, the time has come to rethink how high the walls separating the sciences from the humanities and the arts should be. This is especially true in education at all levels, both formal and informal. It is not an accident that distrust in science is rampant in this country and others. The teaching of science boasts its separation from our humanity, relegating subjective and existential concerns as secondary. The teaching of the humanities distances itself from the sciences. In the overwhelming majority of cases, a science class is strictly about technical content, the programmatic instructing of the tools and jargon needed to enter the guild. Students don't learn about the scientists themselves, the cultural context of their times, or the struggles and challenges, often very dramatic, that colored their research path.

Traditional science teaching adopts what could be called the conquering mode: It's all about the final results, not about the difficulties of the process, the failures and the challenges that humanize science. This dehumanizing approach works as a cleaver, splitting students and the public into two distinct groups: those who embrace a dehumanized science teaching and those who shun it. One of the consequences, as we see in movies and books, is the widespread stereotype of the nerdy, cold scientist, intent on the research and not much else, more like a reasoning machine than a human being. This image, obviously totally false, must go. When it comes to life choices—vaccines, nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, global warming—why should the general public trust the pronouncements of such a specialist? As a timely example, we can see why so many people trust Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden. He is seen as a human before he is seen as a specialist.

Science doesn't exist in a cultural and existential vacuum and its teaching shouldn't either. I say this after 30 years of classroom experience, both in technical and nontechnical science classes. Although teachers are always pressed for time to cover their assigned syllabi, they will be educating and inspiring better scientists and citizens if they took the time to humanize the science they teach.

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This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Marcelo Gleiser