Inquiry, the Science Teacher, and the Educator

Science educators can no longer meet in privacy nor any longer treat their problems as their own. For science and science education are now parts and instruments of an urgent national policy, and the teachers, researchers, and teachers of teachers who lead these enterprises are joint executors of that policy. Furthermore, they face a new problem that stems from science itself-a problem new in so great a degree that it amounts to a difference in kind. The elements of novelty are so potent, indeed, that the problem will not be solved by the means and methods which have adjusted science education in the past. Redistribution of student time, the reordering of standard units and departments of instruction, and new techniques of teaching will be needed. By themselves, however, these ameliorations will not adjust science teaching to the change in science and to the national need which now faces us. A much more radical overhaul is in order, one which will involve the very content of many of our courses, their aims, their methods, and their essential structure. What are these factors which, to such great extent, shape our problem? The first is the urgent need to rebuild the capital of American brainpower and its popular support, a capital we have spent with little replenishment over the past forty years. The second, the change in science, is its transformation from a literal-minded empiricism to a complex in which conceptual invention plays a JOSEPH J. SCHWAB is a professor in the Department of Education at the University of Chicago. His article is based on a talk delivered before the Association for Educa