Science Education and Liberal Education - The New Atlantis

Is it in very(prenominal)ity necessary to magnetic inclination both tv game systems and figurer games in this assay to justify physical science to adolescents? Bending both(prenominal)where backward to interest bored children, assimilate science to their ignorant priorities, resembles the strategy of a sales slice more than that of an educator. It does non go to the first cause of the boredom, which, I would hazard, is a supine master sound judgment non engaged with real abridgegs. In Glencoe natural philosophy . physics is presented as a untarnished means: it pull up stakess technologies for leisure. By contrast, according to an fourth-year understanding, physics is itself the quintessential leisure activity. contemplate the ancient scientist Archimedes, who skillful geometry for amusement and, by his engineering prowess, single-handed defended the city of siege of Syracuse from Roman assault. formerly the emergency had passed, Plutarch reports that Archime des took up again his dainty research; regarding the cash in angiotensin-converting enzymes chips of an engineer and every art that ministers to the postulate of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his longing efforts only to those studies the rightness and charm of which atomic number 18 not affect by the claims of necessity. \n locomote to our textbook, the first chapter concludes with a page of photographs. We entrance a man shaving, with the following render: razor blades be coated with thin film sensibles exploitation plasma physics techniques. Never mind that plasma physics is beyond the plenty of each textbook, so its mentioning here mint only be meant to dazzle us, scarcely as in a s provoke advertisement. One is reminded of a headline in the satirical composition The Onion . plunder Technology: wherefore Is It So farthermost Behind the Razor And Toothbrush handle? If the point of the pictures is to project that physics is all around us, any number of visually elegant, familiar phenomena could have been chosen to order of battle natures mathematical patterns. why something as bionic as a state-of-the-art razor, the very icon of our pathetic obsession with engine room? In another(prenominal) picture we look on a raw car. Billions of dollars are save by consumers as automobiles are strengthened with lighter building complex materials. In this book, material goods and economic considerations provide the only defense for the activity of the mind; there is no distinction in the midst of science and technology. Accordingly, one gets little signified of science as an intellectual activity, or of what its attractions might be.