A plea for "A different type of education" or "What type of science does an educated person need?" The problems of imparting science and how to overcome them

The problems of imparting science and how to overcome them

More than forty years ago the French historian Jacques Barzun made the following statement in the preface to the book of the British philosopher, Stephen Toulmin, entitled “Foresight and Understanding”: We can say that Western society at present hosts science like a foreign God. Our life is being changed by His works, but Western people are as far off from understanding this strange power, as is a peasant in a remote medieval village from understanding the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. And what is even worse: Today the gap is evidently wider than it was one hundred years ago. The problem is that science – even for the scientists themselves – has ceased to be a principal unit and subject of contemplation. In the meantime the gap has become much wider still.

Science and Art must concern, move and affect the people

Do we really not know that? Or is it only the officials of science who don’t? They are the ones who have been trying for a number of years to organise a “public understanding of science (PUS)” for the people, without being able to express their proposition in understandable – and maybe even German – words. And if we are not altogether mistaken, these highly official endeavours to impart science will be just as useless as a delicate pair of tweezers in the hands of a plumber, as the American writer Raymond Chandler would have put it. As early as in 1938 he pointed out that the way to Man’s heart is through the arts. Just as art remains ridiculous without science, science will stay inhuman without art. To put it more concretely, science without art excludes the people, thus achieving the exact opposite of what is intended by the PUS project. Isn’t it true that we can only trust science if we recognize that it is being made, just like works of art, by feeling persons? It is exactly this aspect that is lost when we are only being told in detail how a new alloy works, how tensides can cope better with fat molecules or whether a newly discovered DNA sequence informs us about a genetic switch mechanism. The importance of art for science was of course also realized by Goethe, both poet and scientist, who explicitly set forth in his Theory of Colours: “If we expect it to be holistic we will necessarily have to think of science as an art.” And Goethe adds how this could be accomplished: “So as to try and meet such a requirement, we must not exclude any of the human powers from scientific activity. An abyss of ideas, secure perception of the present, mathematical depth, physical accurateness, height of reason, sharpness of intellect, flexible and wistful imagination, loving joy of sensory perception, none of these can be dispensed with to actively grasp the moment.” At this point it is claimed that science can be imparted and made understandable at the very moment one succeeds in giving science a shape by which the aforementioned powers are being activated, in other words a shape that can be perceived by Man and can be viewed like a work of art. It does not matter if the truth of this shape is experienced as an open mystery instead. To quote Albert Einstein, he said: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” It is the fundamental feeling standing at the cradle of true art and science.” If one succeeds in giving science such a shape, a discerning knowledge of science can develop just like there is a discerning knowledge of art, which one has even if one is unable to explain exactly what a counterpoint or a cadence is or what role the Pythagorean comma plays”.

Giving science a shape

Science will not get the shape necessary for public understanding, if we carry on as in the past and restrict ourselves to explaining some delicate mechanisms, no matter how difficult and how rewarding this may be in each individual case. What is, however, required is something that might be called “shaping of science”, which was characterized by Thomas Mann in a way that may be too drastic to describe the task. He called his own way of acquiring scientific knowledge – e.g. Egyptology or biological sciences of his time – and enlarging upon it in his novels “copying on a higher level”. The difference as compared to scientific journalism practised so far as “copying on a lower level” lies in the fact that the science that has not only been reported and explained, but has also been shaped and transformed distinguishes itself by one creative element, with the help of which the experts’ abstract knowledge can be transferred into the world as it is experienced by non-experts. What actually matters is to illustrate scientific findings in such a way that their context to life as a whole becomes discernible and the human relation is perceivable, since this is what people consider important in the first place. We cannot understand an entire galaxy which has been broken down into its very atoms by rationalism, but we are very well able to understand a chubby-cheeked angel and a cloven-footed devil who we believe in from the bottom of our heart.” This is how Egon Friedell put it in his admittedly rather old, but still published and readable “Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit” (History of Culture of Modern Times). Those who have made the imparting of science their goal, should take this idea seriously. Friedell does not say that no one wants to know about atoms and chemical combinations. He only says that the relevant explanations should be accompanied by an aesthetic component to make them perceivable for the people so that research can be experienced as a whole. Unfortunately in our culture “the understanding of the necessity to reinforce the aesthetic component is all but widespread”, as the biologist Adolf Portmann from Basle observed already in 1949 in his lecture under the title “Biology for Aesthetic Education”: “Too many people believe that merely developing the logical side of thinking is the main task in educating human beings. Those who share this thinking forget that the actual productive way of thinking always requires intuitive and spontaneously creative work – even in the fields of highly accurate research – and thus the aesthetic function; that dreaming and day dreaming, just like any sensory perception, opens up invaluable opportunities.

Science as a window to the world

Once science has been given a shape it can also solve the problem it has primarily had by becoming so abstract since the beginning of the 20th century. When Albert Einstein explained the cosmos by way of a complicated equation, the poet Alfred Döblin complained that he, not being a mathematician, would henceforth be excluded from understanding this world in which after all he was living. As a matter of fact we can read time and again what e.g. Karl Schwedhelm wrote in 1964 in an essay under the title “The poem in its modified reality”: For our kind of people, who do not engage in natural science, the changes in classical physics that have been going on for little more than half a century will remain largely obscure. The artist will be equally excluded from this foggy, esoteric realm of complicated functions and differential equations. Is such a pessimistic outlook valid? I believe it is not, considering that Einstein’s first and foremost goal was not to derive a formula. For him the formula was but a window (constructed with mathematical symbols) through which he could look in order to understand the world lying outside. It is not the formula that matters, but much rather what becomes visible by means of that formula. Certainly we can see the same thing if we are willing to look for another window (with different symbols). But these windows don’t come up by mere coincidence; to generate them is certainly just as difficult as deriving the equation of gravitation. However, art should be able to accomplish that.

Education enables people to engage in dialogue

The question raised in the title of this speech, i.e. what type of science do educated people need, may best be answered by what has been said so far: People need the science they can grasp, as it affords them an insight into the world and, at the same time, into themselves. Thus people are able to recognize how much science is in them and part of them – and at the same time part of the human being in general. Once this link has been accomplished, the goals of the PUS project – “public understanding of science – will be reached. So everything that connects people beyond their professions and enables them to engage in dialogue could be called education. With the help of education, the individual is enabled to become independent and free and to take part in culture as a whole including the respective intellectual enjoyment. So far it has been disputed that science can contribute toward that at all. Dietrich Schwanitz’s bestseller “Education – Everything you are supposed to know” states: “It is true that a knowledge of science is being taught in school; it even contributes to understanding nature, but it contributes very little to understanding culture…. -unresolved- as regrettable as it may appear to many a person: Although scientific knowledge does not have to be concealed, it is not part of education.” The scientists are therefore called upon to furnish a proof to the contrary and to demonstrate that apart from education in the humanities there is also an education in science. In my book “A different type of education” I have tried to show that science can essentially be what it is supposed to be, i.e. “in principle a unit and a subject of contemplation.”

Science “includes” a meaningfulness related to human life conditions

Coming to the end of his lecture, Prof. Fischer added: “I believe the quote from Schwanitz’s book – and the wide acceptance of it in Germany – to be both stupid and dangerous. We would be better off if it was the natural task of an educated person of our times to be equally familiar with the concept of evolution as with the physical theory of the atoms and the way a chemical combination comes about. The knowledge acquired thereby provides a meaningfulness related to human life conditions, as long as we communicate about this knowledge in a suitable way. Persons are educated who are able to converse about science and have the feeling of being entertained at the same time. What we need for the future are educated people to talk to who are aware that science is within them and a part of them – and part of humanity in general. Only this relationship will allow the interest – the willingness to engage in dialogue – to arise which is needed so that all of us can take on the responsibility science demands today.