On Losing and Regaining My Love For Science

Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor

I first wanted to become a “scientist” in second grade, not long after discovering Doctor Who reruns on PBS. I’m sure it wasn’t a coincidence. The Doctor, then played by Tom Baker, presented himself as a scientist, and frequently expounded on difficult scientific topics in layman’s language to advance the story. But for him, science was a journey, an opportunity to meet new people and have new experiences and, frequently, confront injustice at the root.

Whenever anybody asked grade-school Kevin what he wanted to be when he “grew up,” he continued insisting he wanted to be a “scientist” for years. I read books on science history for kids, which often presented science in metaphor: Louis Pasteur’s early vaccination experiments, for instance, were presented as armed soldiers posting pickets around a weakened body and defending it against an invading army. Science became a source of adventure.

Not until middle grades did I actually study science as a distinct discipline. Then, we began performing “experiments” demonstrating important concepts like, say, the states of matter, the function of liquid capillarity, or the complexity of vertebrate vascular systems. Fun stuff, in isolation. Except we performed each “experiment” one time, and if we didn’t achieve the preordained outcome, we flunked. This “science” was remarkably rote and cheerless.

Where, I wondered, was the adventure which The Doctor encountered, and equally importantly, the moral purpose? We weren’t venturing into unknown countries to gather new evidence and fight the scourge of ignorance that kept entire populations enslaved. We were repeating experiments so crinkum-crankum that the results were absolute. While we individually definitely learned new facts, the facts we learned were vetted and ratified in advance by authority figures.

Before going further, let me emphasize: I don’t blame individual teachers for this. Teachers must face bureaucratic intransigence, work with textbooks pre-approved by those same authority figures, and teach to the test. As Dana Goldstein writes, America’s school systems are organized around cost efficiency, not learning outcomes. Many top-tier teachers resist monolithic book learning, but can only accomplish so much when fighting the system.

Louis Pasteur, discoverer of multiple
medical procedures

But the effect was the same: the sense of moral adventure which Doctor Who promised came sideways against an educational system which only permitted experimental results which were absolutely true. There was no venturing off the map in school science. I now know, as I couldn’t have known in middle school, that this wasn’t accidental. Powerful people, and the legislators they purchase, want all “learning” to result in predictable outcomes which discourage questions.

In my childhood, science was the battlefield to control the public discussion. Important religious leaders actively torpedoed any inquiry which would verify the theory of evolution (and, in some places, still do). Today, that battle has shifted to history, where teachers are required to teach bland myths and scrub history of any ambiguity or fault. In both cases, the underlying philosophy remains unchanged: prevent questions by excluding doubt.

During college, I discovered physics, and felt jolted. Before college, my limited understanding of “science” basically bifurcated into either chemistry or biology, both of which deeply disappointed me. Physics, by contrast, held the same qualities I found in science fiction adventure stories: degrees of uncertainty, reasoning through analogy, and an element of faith. In physics, all explanations are provisional, and failure is embraced in ways high school chemistry rejects.

Had I discovered physics earlier, my life might look different today. Surely some teacher somewhere introduced the discipline, but amid the crush of mandatory points which state boards required them to hit, the information got lost. By college, I’d shifted to literature, the discipline which promised the moral purpose which “science” no longer offered. Also, without a scientific goal, my math scores had languished beyond repair.

Mathematician Paul Lockhart writes about teaching middle-school math by ripping away students’ reliance on absolutely correct answers. When uncertainty becomes common again, students reinvest themselves in the process, and fall in love with learning as an adventure. A history teacher I know does something similar, capping his course with a role-play about rebuilding civilization after an EMP. Doubt becomes central to students’ intellectual investment.

I embraced the idea of “science” in childhood because it seemed bold and adventurous. But by eighth grade, I’d abandoned that ambition because it became tedious and repetitive. Only in adulthood did I discover how that tedium was engineered by powerful people to support their own power. We citizens need to reject the narrative, in any discipline, that questions are bad. Because bad people profit from our lack of answers.