Back to the Future: Recovering the Civic Purpose of Science Education

Since the assault on the US Capitol there is no longer any question that US democracy is in crisis. Racial, economic, social, and political divisions are growing. Media manipulation, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and strategic court rulings have allowed an explicitly anti-democratic minority to disproportionately influence public discourse, law and policy, a situation accelerated by a lack of public understanding of basic elements of American governance. A common diagnosis is that chronic underinvestment in civic education, attributed to an overemphasis on STEM, has worsened this situation and the Higher Education community has responded with analyses, and prescriptions to increase the undergraduate curriculum devoted to civic education.
This presentation will provide a brief overview of these initiatives and challenge to two key assumptions that organize the changes being proposed:
1. That improving civic education requires a "zero-sum" re-balancing of resources from the STEM, which is increasingly dominating majors, curriculum, funding, and academic resources, to the traditional vehicles of "civic education,"--history, government, political science. There is no question that the unflagging boosterism for STEM as the economically prudent choice of study underlies the freefall in humanities and social science enrollments, but does that mean that support for STEM is at the expense of civic learning, as so many articles and commenter have argued? Can science learning be an equally powerful context for civic education?
2. While educating for democracy, and not just workforce needs, will require curricular change, it will also require recovery of values, insights and practices offered by educational visionaries and "scientific democrats, of the past, including John Dewey, Jane Addams, W.E.B DuBois, who, when faced with democratic crises more severe than we face today, looked to scientific inquiry as the vehicle for building civic understanding and democratic capacity.