Here's a very thought-provoking piece on Inside Higher Ed:
It's Time to End 'Physics for Poets'. Colleges that offer science courses for non-majors send unfortunate messages and tolerate student ignorance, writes a physicist. [Inside Higher Ed]
The author, Edward Morley, argues that most science courses for non-majors "happily accommodate their distaste for science and mathematics, by providing them with special classes that minimize the difficult aspects of the subject." He asks us to imagine making similar accommodations for other students, a "Poetry for Physicists" class, say, for those who don't like reading and analyzing texts. As a society, we are comfortable with a level of innumeracy, even in our public intellectuals, that we would consider crippling if it were illiteracy.
I think some of the most interesting comments on this piece come from science writers or popularizers of science. The scientific community has long neglected communicating effectively with non-scientists, and is paying the price now in part in the debates over intelligent design. But another hidden cost is in the loss to science and engineering of individuals who could make a great contribution. Anything that helps maintain the public perception of science and math as too hard, too boring, too difficult, but especially not necessary for the average person to know, will contribute to our inability to sustain the interest of young girls in science and math.
Requiring all college students to take real science and/or math classes, just like they have to take real English composition classes, or real history classes, would have a huge impact. Of course, this would take more than just changing course requirements in the college catalogue. We'd have to change the way we teach science and math in the middle and high schools, as well as at the college level, and change our expectations about who can and should take such courses. In short, we'd have to start expecting that almost anyone might have the potential to become a scientist or engineer, and make sure that the doors to those professions are kept open as long as possible.
Although I don't think it is part of a conscious conspiracy, "Physics for Poets" classes function as part of science and engineering's gate-keeping apparatus, just as much as weed-out courses for the majors do. Thus there is likely to be huge resistance to changing them. The resisters are unlikely to articulate gate-keeping as one reason for their resistance, because it will function at an unconscious level.
Poor teaching, for both majors and non-majors, is so important for the selection process in U.S. science, that it is considered newsworthy and astonishing that Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, should want to turn his talents solely to focus on physics education. And he has to move to Canada to do what he wants to do. If a Nobel Prize isn't enough to get your institution interested in serious education reform, then I don't know what it will take. I find it seriously depressing that Wieman wrote 35 proposals for teaching projects and only got "one small grant from the National Science Foundation to develop computer simulations."
12:20:37 AM 
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