P. Timon McPhearson, Stuart P.D. Gill and Robert Pollack Webcast : Read the Summary

The Place of Science in General Education: Implications from an Integrated Science Curriculum

General education intends to broaden a student's perspective and to develop empathy for other worldviews. Yet experimental science can be quite peripheral or even absent from what passes for general education. While colleges and universities are stuffed with science courses, they result in singularly little sympathy or understanding of science for many if not most undergraduates. The barriers preventing general education from bringing science to non-scientists are many. When science is not well integrated into a general educated worldview, science can be easily misjudged as capable of taking the place of other modes of analysis; in particular, it can be asked to generate rules for deciding right from wrong, which it cannot do. At Columbia University we have endeavored to repair this problem locally by creating a new required core undergraduate course that makes the science component of a solid general education curriculum interdepartmental, taught by practitioners of science, and which offers students an opportunity to debate and discuss the philosophical, historical and methodological contexts of current research. We have an obligation to preserve a flat field for discourse among the diverse groups who come together in academic settings. General education in science is the one obvious but largely untested way to show that science is in fact open to people of all backgrounds.