Abstract
Civic responsibility and science education are rarely paired together. The rise of science in the curriculum closely parallels the redirection and narrowing of the goals of education to primarily preparing students for the workplace. Looking back over the past 100 years, there has been a continual repurposing of schooling. Schools are not longer seen as an aid to democratic well-being, as a vehicle for preparing citizens who possessed the intellectual wherewithal required to shoulder civic responsibilities. Schools today are focused on helping children learn and grow so that America’s economy can compete with the rest of the world. The way science is taught today in most schools reflects the ideas proposed during the Industrial Revolution and mirrors the arguments made by those who championed the logic of Social Darwinism. The current curricular and instructional emphasis on mathematics and science (the so-called STEM disciplines) is predicated on the fact that these disciplines are deemed to be the engines of economic growth. Where is the intersection of science and civic responsibility? We contend that it is in doing science: wielding it, in the interest of improving life in a school’s neighborhood.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Barber, B. (1993). America skips school. Harper’s Magazine, 112, 4–5.
Commager, H. S. (1943). Documents of American history. New York: Crofts & Company.
Cremin, L. (1957). The republic and the school: Horace Mann and the education of free man. New York: Teachers College Press.
Cremin, L. (1980). American education: The national experience, 1783–1876. New York: Harper Colophon Books.
First Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. (1869). Omaha: Nebraska State Historical Society.
Jefferson, T. (1955). The papers of Thomas Jefferson. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kaestle, C. F. (1983). Pillars of the republic: Common schools and American society, 1780–1860. New York: Hill and Wang.
MacMullen, E. N. (1991). In the cause of true education: Henry Barnard and nineteenth-century school reform. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mattingly, P. H., & Stevens, E. W. (1987). Schools and the means of education shall forever be encourage: A history of education in the old northwest, 1787–1880. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Nebraska History and Political Science. (1920). Omaha: Nebraska State Historical Society.
Preskill, S. (1987). Educating for democracy: Charles Eliot and the differentiated curriculum. Educational Theory, 39, 351–369.
Rudolph, F. (1965). Essays on education in the early republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Spencer, H. (1882). The study of society. New York: D. Appleton and Company.
Sumner, W. G. (1914). The challenge of facts and other essays. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Thornton, J. W. (1860). The pulpit of the American Revolution. Boston: Gould and Lincoln.
Tocqueville, A. (1898). Democracy in America. New York: Century Company.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Theobald, P., Siskar, J. (2014). Civic Responsibility and Science Education. In: Mueller, M., Tippins, D., Stewart, A. (eds) Assessing Schools for Generation R (Responsibility). Contemporary Trends and Issues in Science Education, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2748-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2748-9_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-2747-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-2748-9
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)