History in Science Education, with Cautionary Tales about the Agreement of Measurement and Theory

Abstract

We are gathered here because we think that the history of science has an important, even a fundamental role to play in science education. Unfortunately, its most conspicuous current use is as a sugar coating to the hard nuts of the real curriculum. We have failed to persuade textbook writers and science teachers that they have not done their job if they do not make the history of their discipline a significant part of their pedagogical work. One reason for this failure is that we do not offer what they need.

Text of a plenary address to the 5th International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Conference, Pavia University, September 1999. Further information about the cases may be obtained from my The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 7; Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries. A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979; 2nd edn, New York: Dover, 1999), pp. 59–61; and ‘The Origins of the Exclusion Principle’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences Vol. 19 (1982), pp. 261–310.