The difference between how the world appears in direct experience and how it appears through investigation generates philosophical problems. This is one reason why it is impossible to separate science education from philosophy: even if a scientific theory is not itself ‘philosophical’ (which I question, but for another time), the chasm that theory opens up when juxtaposed against taken-for-granted experience is filled with question marks. Consider, for example, the difference between the mechanical cause-and-effect explanations commonplace in molecular biology and the feeling of what it is like to be alive at ‘our’ level of the world.
One quality that obviously characterises living organisms, be it trees or birds or people, is that they are organic. This means that while there may be regularities in their structure or behaviour, they are not predictable. In animal just as in plant, life feels wild and free, each according to its kind. With the rise of mechanistic explanations, we are posed with a problem. Between wildness and mechanism, what is appearance and what is reality? This is a philosophical question, and it gives rise to philosophical hypotheses: Animals are ‘really’ just giant, complex molecules, and their wildness is just an illusion. Or, the world is everywhere wild and the causal necessity we see in biochemistry tells us more about how we look at the world when we investigate it than how it ‘really’ is. Or perhaps some hypothesis about how order evolves freedom, and so on. A similar chain of questions arise when we consider how these biochemicals are assumed to be lacking sentience whereas our experience of life is that it is filled with feeling. How did molecules become feeling? How could we know? How do we know molecules are insensate?
If we do not confront the chasm, there are pedagogical dangers. If we do, there are exciting rewards. If students are continuously taught that varied aspects of life are all explained by underlying mechanism, they may begin importing such schemes into how they template encounters with life in their daily world. I often see people explain the activity of an animal they see as ‘just instinct’, which is an effective way of shutting out any further interest into the creature. There are implications for Learning for Sustainability here, because constrained ways of seeing creatures lead to constrained ways of interacting with them, further a dislocation of humans and the rest of the living world. Alternatively, many students may simply not see the significance of these countless mechanical details, which feel disconnected from their real worlds. The may get bored and tune out, concluding that even though they thought they were passionate about the living world, biology is not for them. I worry often a combination occurs, where students abandon the subject feeling that life is a complex, tedious machine without vitality, a repetitive reorganising of particles without freshness, an intimidating scribble of acronyms and arrows without inspiration.
We might avoid turning students off by confronting the chasm head on. The contradictions between our models and the world we so clearly see and breathe gives rise to questions, and it is in these questions that students can connect the meaning of what they study to their lives. Is life just a complex molecule? If so, then why do living things seem so free? How can molecules become free and still obey their laws? If molecules have wildness in them too, then why do they succumb to our chemical theories? Is it possible to come up with an explanation that does not reduce phenomena to cause and effect mechanism? What does the answer to this question mean about human knowing and/or the world?
Exploring the chasm is the flip side of cultivating knowledge. An enriching experience more deeply encountering the world arises through engaging with the interplay between answers and questions. Science curricula will not effectively engage the imagination of many students when subject teaching is conceived primarily as the developing and deepening of knowledge alone. It will exclude those who vaguely feel the contradictions I’ve been discussing, feelings unacknowledged as the contradictions go unarticulated and the course units march on. For those teaching in countries where assessment is still geared towards establishing how many facts have been filled into the head, working the chasm will likely be a few minutes here and there, every so often. But we must judge our educational impact based on the amount of time we spend on a subject. A careful and well-timed question may take 20 seconds to pose, a further 10 seconds to linger on in silence, but have far more reaching consequences for a young person that a dozen hours spent on mandatory course specifications.