Epistemology for the Masses: The Origins of “The Scientific Method” in American Schools

In the widely disseminated Harvard report General Education in a Free Society (1945), the authors of the section on science teaching in the schools made passing reference to the portrayal of the scientific method in the existing curriculum. Rather than simply noting its inadequacy in representing the process of scientific research, they could not resist the urge to deliver a more scathing commentary. “Nothing could be more stultifying, and, perhaps more important, nothing is further from the procedure of the scientist,” they insisted, “than a rigorous tabular progression through the supposed ‘steps' of the scientific method, with perhaps the further requirement that the student not only memorize but follow this sequence in his attempt to understand natural phenomena.” This indictment was followed in 1951 by similar comments from Harvard president James B. Conant in his book Science and Common Sense. Conant's criticism of what he called the “alleged scientific method,” seemed to resonate with interested readers of the time. The eminent wartime research director Vannevar Bush, writing in the Saturday Review, praised him for making it “crystal clear that there is no such thing as the scientific method.” “The elegant definition of the scientific method that we have read for years,” he noted approvingly, “comes in for the dissection it has long needed.” Another reviewer hailed Conant's “service to the community [in] briefing the busy citizen on the way in which science really works,” noting also that he had “effectively demolished] conventional twaddle about the scientific method.”