Making the history of Science integral to Science instruction in primary and secondary schools as a way to create deeper understanding and engagement with Science.

Science instruction today is mostly about memorising facts and figures in biology and chemistry and memorising formulae and applying them in addition to the above in Physics.

A substantial percentage of the Indian populace has learnt about the theory of gravitation or the atomic hypothesis or about electricity and magnetism. But most of what is learnt is lost after reproducing it in exams.

The complexity of the subject at hand does not probably lend it self to be understood by a high school student and it may be argued that it is because of this that at that stage a student is only introduced to the facts and figures of the world of science and not to the skepticism, the logical argumentation , ingenuity and the sheer genius which lies at the heart of it .

A question may be asked is that if the result of science instruction is only for students to memorise facts and forget them later then why go through the effort in the first place. At present, India is seeing a surge in the adoption of blind faith. Many who believe in these blind practices like Feng Shui , Reiki, Vastu or some spiritual baba or the other would surely have studied science during their days at school. If one takes an average sample of people, there will probably be a much much greater number of people who do not appreciate or remotely understand the power of science and what it has given to the world than those who abide by it and appreciate science for what it is and what it has given to the world. The proportion of people who truly understand the scientific process and why it really works and the level of razor sharp precision and insight that if can offer is probably an even smaller subset of the latter group.

This is truly a very sad state of affairs. Science being the force that it is, something that is a pillar on which the modern world stands is not only something that forms the back bone of the global economy but also holds tremendous potential to empower people , the failure of the education system to help students assimilate and connect to Science is truly a colossal one. 

That being true, would it not be of value to integrate the genesis of scientific discoveries in Science classrooms. How can this be done ? The direction in general is, instead of circumscribing the length and breadth of the world of science from Ptolemy to Einstein at a superficial, factual level, it would be far more useful to pick up only a few episodes from the history of Science and re-trace the path that was taken upto the point of culmination of those episodes.

Take for example Heliocentricism. Most books just talk about the fact that the greeks came up with a geo centric model and that the likes of Copernicus, Galileo , Tycho Brahe worked to over throw the theory. But almost no book really ever talks about how the greeks arrived at the model in the first place. How can one come to arrive at such an intricate model of the universe which could  roughly predict the movements of the heavenly bodies by just looking at them with the naked eye ? How did they even measure the movements of the heavenly bodies ? The work of Ptolemy and his contemporaries only constitutes a precursor to modern science and does not mark a huge departure from common sense. Modern science is highly formal and far removed from common sense and intuition. When our education cannot help students understand clearly about even the foundations of modern science then the merit of introducing concepts from the modern era like atomic orbital theory and photo electric effect is highly questionable. Students will only know such things at best as interesting facts but more generally as facts that must be memorised, regurgitated during exams and forgotten after that.

Instead, if science instruction can follow the development of some basic landmarks in the world of science, it would help not only make more students assimilate science as a part of their thought process but may also generate interest and inspire more students to take up research in natural sciences. Taking further the example of the Geocentric theory of the Greeks as elucidated by Ptolemy, the general direction that the science classroom could follow is to actually encourage children to observe the sky and try to come up with hypotheses themselves. Then divide them into groups to develop arguments to support one or the other hypotheses and have formal , courtroom like discussions and debates in which the teacher plays the role of the moderator. This way children learn not only about the outcome of the scientific process but are able to connect to it at a far deeper level. They develop the skill of drawing generalisations and logical arguments to support or oppose hypotheses. This process of hypotheses , observation and logical argumentation is what lies at the heart of science. Through this process the student can connect at a far deeper level to the ideas of Science, and may even get inspired and motivated to pursue it further in his/her life. But the least that one can expect is that the alienation that the common man / woman has developed to Science as a whole will reduce thus helping to buck the trend of blind faith. Also as the saying goes, knowledge is power,  it would  help to empower the individual.

As a society this will translate into more people being immune to the deceptive charms of the institutions of blind faith, feel more empowered, and become more responsible and discerning citizens of the world