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Mercury, July/August 1996 Table of Contents

(c) 1996 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

An English professor recently told me that in his students' broken papers, he is witnessing "the death of language." Tangled tenses, mangled modifiers -- that's normal. But the lack of ideas and drive to improve reveals a deeper rot. Science teachers say the same. Where is students' hunger to learn? Are we witnessing in today's young people the death of science?

"I've taught classes where kids were so unmotivated that they wouldn't even copy [from each other]," said Jonathan Frank, a chemistry teacher at Lincoln High School in San Francisco. "They just didn't care."

For his recent book Beyond the Classroom, Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg surveyed 20,000 high-school students in Wisconsin and California. Two- fifths said they didn't pay attention in class. Only one in five said their friends thought it was important to get good grades.

Immigrant students slam shut the same lockers and endure the same teachers, yet they thrive [see "The Generation X Files," p. 33]. Our schools, whatever their flaws, are still quite capable of educating. Maybe science-education reformers need to think less about teaching and more about students' social environment.

Curricula and standards

Frank said he quit the American Association for the Advancement of Science's "Project 2061" because reformers spent their time designing ideal curricula and neglected the reality of teaching lackadaisical students.

"They didn't talk about how to enforce standards," Frank said. "They didn't talk about all the behavior stuff, or restructuring school to get more accountability in students' day- to-day existence."

Curriculum reform is the fashionable way that scientists try to help schools, but teachers say the handy handbooks and reworked workbooks wither on the shelves. "An emphasis on curriculum development tends to underestimate the far more difficult problem of curriculum support and development," Caltech neurobiologist and teacher-trainer James Bower told a Sigma Xi forum two years ago.

What teachers need, Frank said, are ways to prove to students that learning matters -- and that not bothering has tangible consequences. Role models help, but professors must also lobby their universities to tighten admissions requirements and eliminate remedial courses. Frank said the University of California recently made admission conditional on second- semester senior grades. The result: His seniors perked up.

"The kids are smarter than we think," Frank said. "Once those higher standards exist, a lot of kids will live up to them."

Parents

Few astronomy-education programs involve parents. The Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics has brought middle-school students and their parents together [see "The Cosmic Bamba," p. 30]; planetarium shows are geared toward families. Most programs, however, focus on the classroom.

Plugging parents in, Steinberg wrote, is one of the main things education reformers can do to counter adolescent anti- intellectualism. A third of the students in his survey said their parents had no idea how they were doing in school. Half said they could bring home a grade of 'C' or lower without their parents getting upset.

Young people

One group is conspicuously absent from the symposia and workshops of astronomy education: the students. They can be energetic forces for change, but too many schools -- not to mention society at large -- think of the masses as addicts-in- waiting, not as underutilized citizens.

Only students can answer many of the key questions: How can schools work within adolescent society to enhance the profile of academics? How can adults make themselves available in the right ways? Is the World Wide Web more than entertainment [see "Crawling Through Cyberspace," p. 8]? How can older students reach out to younger ones [see "I Hope That I Could Come," p. 23]?

"Kids run schools," Brown University educationalist Ted Sizer wrote in Horace's Compromise. "If we want our well-intentioned plans to succeed, we'll have to inspire the adolescents to join in them -- inspire even the sullen, uninterested kids one sees in parking lots at the start of a school day."

Inspire doesn't mean "entertain." Teachers and their allies can demonstrate why learning is important and give students the resources they'll need. But the real work? That's up to the students.