A Scientific Problem

In the modern world, science is everywhere. Whether it’s understanding a doctor’s prognosis, navigating the politics of global warming, or even just understanding that mixing bleach and ammonia is not a good idea, to be educated today means to be scientifically literate. It is embarrassing that this can’t be said of every Harvard College graduate.

The basic problem plaguing the current Core Curriculum’s science program is a lack of rigor. Students can easily make their way through their 32 courses at Harvard without ever really encountering the scientific method or learning what a controlled experiment is. If a Harvard student doesn’t understand a scientific issue, his general education coursework should at least give him the wherewithal to become informed.

The Task Force on General Education’s proposal is a good start; the exclusion of courses like Science B-57, “Dinosaurs and Their Relatives,” which fail to provide basic science literacy, will make the general science curriculum more relevant and useful to humanities and social science concentrators.

Moreover, the committee is right to require that courses “teach key scientific concepts” and “impart an understanding of the methods and process of scientific research, discovery, and invention.” Nevertheless, such a philosophy is only as good as its application. For example, the report’s citation of Molecular and Cellular Biology 60, “Ethics, Biotechnology, and the Future of Human Nature”—which last year could be petitioned to count for the current Moral Reasoning requirement—as an acceptable scientific general education course is dubious at best. In our view, such a course places too much emphasis on the report’s third, less significant, criterion for a Science and Technology general education course—that it “frame this material in the context of social issues.”

In fact, we hope that as the Faculty reconsiders the general education proposal, it drops this third criterion altogether. While certainly courses should be created—such as Life Sciences 1a and 1b—that do use social context to frame scientific teaching, there is much to be said for releasing more advanced students from the frustrations of taking introductory courses. Moreover, ambitious students should be encouraged, not discouraged, to take more advanced pure science courses. A class need not explicitly discuss connections to society in order to provide students with useful knowledge. A basic understanding of DNA, genes, and cellular mechanics, for example, is critical to understanding cancer research and the stem cell debate. We are confident that students are bright enough to consider the relevant connections even if the course doesn’t go out of its way to discuss them.

Similarly, the Analytical Reasoning “skill category” should evaluate classes based on their subject and rigor rather than on a strict interpretation of relevance to society today. The report defines Analytical Reasoning to be a set of “conceptual skills” that include “logic, statistics, probability theory, and rational decision theory.” Proof-based math classes, however, do not count on the grounds that “the sort of analytical reasoning used in math proofs” doesn’t necessarily apply to the real world. While the language of higher math may not be applicable, the rigorous logical structure these classes teach is certainly relevant to forming solid, coherent arguments. And it is simply naive to think that a Math concentrator needs to sit through “Statistics for Life” in order to understand “analytical reasoning.”

While we ultimately agree with the philosophical thrust of the report—that general education should provide students with knowledge that will help them understand the modern world—we don’t think every course needs to bend over backwards to connect all the dots for students. Harvard students are bright enough to do that themselves.