Innovation Book Review: Laser Goldberg’s Teaching Science to Children
Dr. David H. Niebuhr
Visiting Assistant Professor of Science Education
School of Education
College of William and Mary
dniebuhr@wm.edu
Lazer Goldberg. 1970. Teaching Science to Children, (1997 edition: Dover Publications, Inc. Mineola, NY). 139 pp. ISBN 0-486-29600-8
“One of the central mistakes of the school has been to model children’s learning experience, including their science learning, much more nearly after the factory than after the real activity of scientists…” (p.49).
The truth is simple. Science is a creative, artistic endeavor that perpetuates itself on wonder, exploration, experimentation, failure, revision, self-evaluation, and learning. Lazer Goldberg’s words, despite being written over 35 years ago, were never more needed to be heard than now. In our modern scientific world of publication, grant success, accountability, and content-driven standardized testing, we have abolished the creativity in our teaching, and have stifled our students’ ability to enjoy the process of science. Goldberg’s words become prophetic as he concludes his thoughts on schools as factories:
Many children, particularly in the intermediate and upper grades, do not find the factory description of the school an amusing caricature. The quest for efficiency is not funny. It is deadly serious. Education has become big business. What is more natural, when education is to be ‘businesslike,’ than to invite system analysts to help get a good, standardized product, a ‘nice package,’ at minimal cost in time and money. Such a system may produce neat packages, but will not educate children. Like the old factory system, it will only stupefy. (p. 49-50)
We hear this message of “efficiency” and “standardization” from our political leaders as they continue to reform our schools and classrooms into cost-effective and accountable entities. Yet our scientific community must also share the blame for the “stupefication” of our students. We, who teach the children science, must bear the burden of over-emphasis on the “essential” content and facts, on “getting through the material” and on being slaves to time and resources. We are on the front lines of education and yet we stifle our students’ creativity and interest in exploration by concentrating our efforts on the course content rather than the course experience. Our examinations are not created to evaluate what the students have learned so much as to be a measure of what we feel are valid and important areas of science content.
Goldberg’s book is written in a conversational tone, as if he were sitting in your office passionately suggesting that you reassess your teaching style, your motivation for the structure of your teaching, and your emphasis in evaluating your students’ learning. Like prodigal children who have wandered away from the wonder and exploration of science to dwell in the memorization of facts and techniques, we educators need to be nurtured in an acceptance of a different perspective, a perspective of challenge and wonder, of problem solving and questioning that encompasses what it means to be a scientist. We need to find the motivation in us and instill that motivation in our students, and remember that “it is this very quality, the self-motivated pursuit of interesting questions and problems, the challenge to resolve enigmas, that has enabled scientists to be so remarkably productive” (p. 45). We science teachers must return to the reason we became scientists in the first place &mdash the unquenchable need to figure out the puzzles before us — and we need to preserve this type of learning in young students while we work to cultivate it at the high school and college level.
This small book is a catalyst for changing the way you teach and the way your students learn. Teaching Science to Children is not a research text, but rather a clearly articulated justification for preserving and instilling scientific passion in your students. It is a guide to broaden your thinking, a quiet voice of reason in a world of data and facts, and a sensible balance in a world gone crazy with a factory mentality. Read it. Ponder its message, and explore how to restore to your students that innate and very human sense of wonder about the world around them.
