Connected Knowledge: Science, Philosophy, and Education by Alan Cromer, Oxford University Press, $25, 221 pages.




The News & Observer

January 11, 1998

Connected Knowledge


By Phillip Manning

Are the public schools educating our children? No, says Alan Cromer, a physics professor at Northeastern University. Instead, professional educators are "rapidly turning us into a nation of illiterates." The problem began, he says, when educators embraced constructivism, an antiscience philosophy whose roots go back to the 18th-century Empiricist philosophers, George Berkeley and Vico Giambattista.

In this important, but not altogether successful, book Professor Cromer critically examines the teaching methods of constructivists. Overall, he finds those methods wanting, especially when applied to teaching science, but he offers little data to support his position. The result is a battle of ideas. And the first shot Cromer chooses to fire is at the antiscience underpinnings of constructivism itself.

Contructivists deny the possibility of objective knowledge, i.e. knowledge that is independent of the observer. They redefine knowledge as a "viable model." And, according to Cromer, many social scientists believe that "science is the particular construction of white males," and that "what is viable for white males at some historical period may not be viable for human beings at some other time." In other words, science is a human construct (like art, literature, and music), rather than a discipline that provides an objective representation of the universe. Cromer -- like most scientists -- strongly disagrees with this idea.

Constructivism may be useful to scholars interpreting works in the humanities, but the essence of science is replication. An experiment must give the same result regardless of the race, gender, or sexual preferences of the person who performs it. If it doesn't, the scientific community will discount the experiment. The cold fusion results that were reported with such fanfare a few years back met with this fate. The work of two well-regarded white-male chemists could not be replicated. And today, no reputable scientists believe in cold fusion.

Cromer, the author of three books of popular science, is at his best when he sticks to what he knows, which is science. He destroys the argument of some social scientists who use the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics to attack the objectivity of science. Quantum mechanics actually makes physics more certain; it allows scientists to explain events that were heretofore unexplainable, like black-body radiation. "'Uncertainty' in quantum mechanics," Cromer says, "doesn't mean 'doubt.'" As Nobel prize winner Hans Bethe says, it really should be called the "certainty principle."

Nevertheless, as long as the constructivist movement didn't directly affect the scientific community, most scientists ignored it. That luxury vanished a decade or two ago when educators adopted the ideas of constructivism to teach science. The result was a rebellion against the "Only the facts, Ma'am" method that once prevailed. Drawing on the work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980), who studied learning processes in children, constructivists concluded that teachers should not be transmitters of knowledge but should act as guides to a child's own discovery of the world. They replaced traditional methods with a holistic approach, in which students are introduced to concepts like Archimedes' principle, a complicated theory of buoyancy, before they are thoroughly grounded in the simpler ideas of mass, volume, and density. To a scientist, this is like trying to teach calculus before the student has mastered algebra.

Cromer (again, like most scientists) prefers the first-things-first approach to science education and believes that holistic methods are a failure. Regrettably, he offers no statistics to back up his contention. Do students educated by one method outperform the others? He doesn't say. To make his case in the absence of data, Cromer follows the same Siren that lured the social scientists into the quicksand of quantum mechanics; he refuses to stick to what he knows. In a foray into linguistics, he suggests that language was invented by children, who taught it to adults. "Talking, in and of itself, is what language is for. Other purposes, such as conveying information, were later adaptations." I find this thesis far fetched, even silly.

In a similar vein, Cromer constructs "a dynamical theory of human development." Based on it, he concludes that humans evolved in an authoritarian social structure and that we need such a system today. "People," Cromer says, "do not live easily side by side, unless there is a superior power to enforce the peace." Consequently, progressive educators -- those who follow Piaget and advocate that a child should learn primarily from experience, with minimal help from a "mentor" -- are going about their jobs wrong, because they are using a anti-authoritarian model of human behavior. Even if Cromer is right about how children should be educated, I doubt if any usable theory of human behavior could be as simple as the one he proposes.

Because Cromer views constructivism and progressivism as attacks on science itself, a discipline he obviously loves, his responses to those attacks are sometimes angry and confusing. In one startling passage, he compares Adolph Hitler's denial of objectivity to that of modern constructivists. In another, he says "[Progressive education] is anti-Newtonian, antipositivist, and anticapitalist. It is moralistic, egalitarian, individualistic, and socialistic. It has been in the forefront of all efforts to expand the human rights and civil rights of blacks and women, . . ." What's so bad about a moral education? What's wrong with trying to expand human rights?

His rants notwithstanding, Cromer's solutions to the problems confronting American education are straightforward. He supports a national curriculum, inexpensive textbooks that the disadvantaged can afford, and the grouping of students by ability. He favors giving a standard test to all ninth graders -- and holding back those who fail it.

Professor Cromer's intemperate attacks on the folks who run our schools make it unlikely that educators will take his suggestions seriously. And that's too bad. Despite his shrill rhetoric, he offers a common-sense approach to public education that deserves consideration.
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