If you would prepare for one hundred years, educate men and women. --Confucius

The key to enhancing society's knowledge of science, and increasing the number of science professionals, clearly lies in improving science education from primary school through the university. This essay will explore some of the ways in which this can be achieved, by examining first elementary, then secondary, and finally college science education.

Many of the ills which afflict pre-college science education do not relate to science education per se, but to education in general. Myriads of books have been written by professional educators on what is wrong with the American school system and how it could be improved upon; for any number of reasons (not least of which is my own lack of expertise in this area) this book will not attempt to evaluate their critiques or choose among their suggestions. Suffice it to say, for the sake of brevity and our purposes here, that the American educational system is in great need of genuine reform, and that many students' home lives and levels of parental involvement are critical to effecting this transformation. The rest I will leave to the experts, who can discuss these problems in whole books.

Nevertheless, there are some recommendations which can be made regarding the way in which science is taught to students from kindergarten through high school. My source of information on this topic stems not from any formal academic training, but rather from thirteen years of experience as a pre-college student.

I am hardly the first graduate of the American educational system to feel that science education in grades K-8 should have been better coordinated between grade levels. To a great extent, science education is vertical learning; that is, the knowledge of new information requires a sound understanding of that which came before. As a result of lack of coordination or adherence to a standard curriculum in earlier years, I discovered that high-school science teachers had to assume that the students' base of scientific knowledge was minimal. The result is that a great deal of time at the high-school level had to be spent covering basic scientific concepts, rather than moving on to more advanced material.

Moreover, one of the great limitations upon advancement in science education is students' knowledge of mathematics. Increasing the emphasis on developing math skills from grades K-8 is essential to students' being able to comprehend physics, chemistry, and other areas of science. I admit that I have no concrete proposals on how to intensify the process of math education; but I do have memories of many hours, in several different grade levels, of classroom time that was all but utterly wasted. It has become cliche to compare the performance of our school system with those in other countries, but I believe that we could learn a thing or two from several other nations, whose students attain much higher levels of mathematical knowledge at earlier ages than do our students.

Furthermore, students need to be made aware of the importance of science and math in so many areas of human life. These subjects are generally treated, at all levels of education, as having little to do with their counterparts in the humanities; a more integrationist approach on the parts of both science and non-science teachers would help students to perceive the relevance of all aspects of their educations. I remember students throughout high school lamenting that they were being required to take scientific subjects which had no relevance whatsoever to their future plans. Aside from the fact that their interests and plans might change with time, these students need to be taught about both the practical applications of scientific knowledge and the utility of scientific thinking in other fields of endeavor. If students are made more aware of the needs they will have for scientific literacy, they will be more likely to pay attention to the material being taught--this much is basic psychology.

Another vital aspect of science education is not part of formal education at all, but rather the the experiences and opportunities afforded by science museums. The many excellent science museums (such as Philadelphia's Franklin Institute) make great contributions to enhancing public interest in and understanding of science; unfortunately, they can only influence the people who actually visit the museums. Though science educators can help to spark young people's enthusiasm for science, the decision about whether children (and their parents) gain the wealth of knowledge provided by science museums is ultimately the responsibility of the parents themselves. The issues in science education at the university level are somewhat different from those in secondary school, although the same need to demonstrate the relevance of the material being studied is critical. Also, students need to be made aware, from their first semester, of the post-graduation opportunities which scientific and engineering studies afford. Undergraduates, though many are fond of beer and other forbidden recreations, are ultimately rational animals, and will often select coursework with some thought about the world beyond college.

Furthermore, even students who have decided--on the basis of negative experiences in high school--that they are not interested in science should be required to take a modicum of scientific courses. In this regard, I write as an advocate of stricter requirements of core requirements for graduation from college. College is, to be sure, a place to explore new ideas and fields, and students need the opportunity to take a number of electives. Like all freedoms, though, the freedom to choose courses must not be absolute, but must be restricted by the requirements of order and discipline. All students should be required to take several courses on science and math, just as they all should be required to gain a knowledge of a foreign language, of some aspect of the social sciences, and of some areas in the humanities. As an undergraduate, I was compelled by Yale's distributional requirements to take at least three courses in each of these areas; rather than finding such a mandate restrictive, I found it to be a liberating experience. And just as no student should acquire a college diploma without having studied the sciences at the college level, no science or engineering specialist should graduate without a basis in the other areas of a liberal-arts education, developing writing skills and an appreciation of areas of knowledge outside their specialty.

There are several ways in which professors can be enabled to better contribute to undergraduate education. As will be discussed in "The Write Stuff," professors need to have some training in order to be able to effectively teach the material which they know so well, and their teaching performance should be made into a more important factor in evaluation of their work. Furthermore, as was mentioned in "The Persistent Misdirection," the gap in levels of difficulty between science courses and their counterparts in the humanities is often daunting. The solution to this problem is not to "dumb down" the sciences, but rather to require that all humanities courses be as rigorous as the best ones are today.

To summarize: the sine qua non for a more scientifically knowledgeable public, and for more scientific and engineering professionals, is dramatic improvements in the ways in which engineering and science are taught. George F. Will has noted that raising and educating children is the most important political act of all; if this were to be done correctly, other major problems could right themselves in the space of a generation. The same is true for science and engineering, whose future depends critically on the work presently being done in kindergarten classrooms and graduate- student laboratories.