Conclusion: Politics and the Scientific Image

In the opening pages of the Biology Teachers’ Handbook, Joseph Schwab looked back over the history of science textbook publishing in the United States and described three phases.The first was from 1890 to 1929, during which time the content of school subjects reflected the structure of their corresponding academic disciplines. Though these textbooks consisted mostly of “disconnected facts and elementary generalizations,” they were, nonetheless, written by “working scientists or colleagues of working scientists.” The second phase, from 1930 to 1960, saw a rapid increase in the size and diversity of the student population and a corresponding rise in the influence of the professional educator on the production of science curricula.The content of the textbooks of this period, Schwab noted,” was no longer mainly determined by the state of knowledge in the scientific field. Important ideas “were omitted or emphasized on the basis of views as to what could be most readily taught,” and what remained was often “modified to conform to theories of teaching and learning,” he explained, “regardless of the extent to which these modifications presented a distorted view of the subject as known by the scientists.” The third phase, of course, had just begun, characterized by the awakening of scientists to their responsibilities for educating the public to the nature of science in the new age.The cycle was thus complete.1