Appelbaum/Davis -- Post Holocaust Science Education

In this chapter we offer an overview of the historiography of science, science education, and scientists in the Third Reich, and present suggestions for science education curriculum in light of that historiography and history. We believe this history offers lessons that heavily reinforce current standards in science education that require science educators to think of science as intimately connected to the society in which it develops. Indeed, we see the science classroom as an essential site for the active discussion and interrogation of the political, rhetorical and ideological role of science. Moreover we urge that such a focus of science education not be limited to classroom instruction but that broader debate be considered an active and essential piece of science education. What this means is that science itself needs redefinition; science as a body of knowledge, way of knowing, and form of professional practice, and the image of "science," must be modified to include both auto-critique and vigilant attention from "laypeople" (Feyerabend 1978). We do not set ourselves up as outside of history or as applying "the lessons of history," but rather we want to interrogate how it might be possible to theorize curriculum given a specific history and set of "difficult memories." What could or should science education practice enact as science, what stories of science should or could such practice "tell," and who is or might be a scientist with or in spite of these difficult memories? What is the role of history and memory in science curriculum work?

In bringing history to science education and science education to memory, we look to a now long-term interest in science as a social and cultural enterprise. Science Education Standards documents emphasize that "scientists bring to their work the values and prejudices of the cultures in which they live" (Rutherford & Ahlgren 1991: 189); that, "where their own personal, institutional, or community interests are at stake, scientists as a group can be expected to be no less biased than other groups are about their perceived interests" (AAAS 1993: 19). Further, science itself "is not separate from society but rather science is a part of society" (NRC 1996: 201). There is also an important body of work in the cultural studies of science and in feminist and sociological critique of science. In this literature, values and interests are considered as central to what becomes understood as "science" and "scientific knowledge." The political aspects and content of scientific practice is juxtaposed with the ways in which science is taught and otherwise communicated in public.

We ask, given the variety of historical interpretations of "science," what we might look for in a responsive science education. More generally, science pedagogy should not be limited to what goes on in the classroom. There must be elements of pedagogy that encourage inclusive debate of the politics and practices of science. Science education should work against the notion that "only scientists" can and should discuss science. Science education must, in the end, make it possible for the general population to understand, appreciate, and critique science and society's interests in science. We believe that science cannot be presented as "inside" a cultural and political context. To do so would perpetuate a myth of neutral science turned to particular ends by external forces, ignoring the ways in which science and individual scientists are part of that culture and politics, nurture compatible ideological movements, and contribute through practice to the society of which they are elements. History, in its identity as a social science, ostensibly bases its conclusions on facticity, as opposed to "memory," which is dismissed as biased and therefore less useful. Yet multiplicities of memories call to our attention the limits of totalizing history -- that only a single story can be told. Just as historians can turn to memory for a richer "truth" in the plurality of narratives, so do we need to include multiplicities of narrative in the stories that are told and composed about science and scientists.

Nazi Science

Was there a Nazi science? Were there "Nazi scientists"? What was the relationship between science and Nazism, and between scientists and Nazis? There is a relatively new but ample historical literature on science, science education, and scientists in the Third Reich that addresses these questions. Recent investigations have sought to understand the relationship between science, modernity, and technocracy in the case of Nazi Germany. This modernity is also central to the regime's stance on science education, as practiced both in and outside of the classroom. Historians have further explored the question of continuities, a central topic of Third Reich history, specifically with respect to the relation to the Third Reich of science in society before and after the Nazi era. The lessons are sobering, and speak to the urgency of creating a science education here and now that uncovers and questions assumptions of science and science pedagogy, both within and outside of schools.

What is Nazi science? Historians have asked this both with respect to the general concept and to individual disciplines. Was there a "Nazi physics" or "Nazi biology"? Scholars have responded with a qualified "yes": that is, there were certainly specificities, particularly with respect to some of the "solutions" to scientific "problems." At the same time scientists' research was not for the most part markedly different from that of their contemporaries outside Germany, including in terms of identifying scientific problems. In their anthology covering the range of scientific disciplines, Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker seek both to specify scientific practices and to discover how the sciences and scientists fared under the regime (Renneberg and Walker 1993). In this volume, as in his monograph, Walker considers the notion of an "Aryan physics" (Walker 1993; Walker 1995; cf. Macrackis 1993; Osietski 1995). Unlike mathematics, psychology, and some of the other sciences, physics was privileged by the regime from the beginning as useful, and most physicists were offered high status and job security as long as they did not oppose the regime. However, it is all too clear how physicists and other scientists effectively supported the regime, and helped both frame and enable its worst excesses. Physicists readily demonstrated how physics could be used to "prove" Nazi ideology, e.g. through reinterpretations of Heisenberg and Bohr. Nazi-era physics was employed to justify war to a war-weary population and to promise military success. (Walker 1993; Tschirner and Göbel 1992) Walker cites the ultimate failure of the notion of a specifically "German physics," as Hitler had proposed: but not before physicists under the regime, whatever their own view of that government, had actively aided and abetted its leaders in carrying out their visions.

Biologists and chemists also found themselves easily making the transition from the republican Weimar state to the Nazi dictatorship (Burleigh 1991; Burleigh 1994; Hayes 1987; Deichmann 1992; Müller-Hill 1988; Weiss 1987; Bäumer-Schleinkofer 1995). They too found themselves in a position to justify their usefulness to the new government, irrespective of their personal lack of especial ideological commitment to the regime. If the scientists most often convinced themselves at the same time of the "purity" of their pursuits, and of true science's insularity from political and cultural influences, Nazi leaders certainly believed that these sciences could "prove" the essential "truth" of Nazism. And they were not disappointed. If German biology of the 1930s and 40s could draw on Konrad Lorenz and Charles Darwin to prove the notion of "life unworthy of life" and demonstrate that even animals "pursue proper racial policy," it was likewise biology and chemistry that helped provide the proper "scientific" means to act on such principles (Burleigh 1994: 183, 192; Bäumer-Schleinkofer 1995). Biologists offered evidence as to the various means by which a body could be starved, gassed, or poisoned. Chemists and chemical engineers responded with new technologies to administer this control over life and death.

Many historians find that the scientists they study were not as a rule avid Nazi ideologues, but rather occupied a gray area as "fellow travelers" to the regime, "in a gray zone" (Cf. Walker 1995:4); some have suggested they were fundamentally "good men" doing evil (Hayes 1987: xi; Lifton 1986). Scientists frequently saw themselves in the role of "bystanders": those who may have been aware of the regime's practices, but who felt unable (if not unwilling) to protest or oppose the regime in meaningful fashion. Such scientists cast themselves far more as victims of the regime than as its supporters, particularly in postwar depositions. Yet recent scholars, from philosophers to literary critics to political scientists, have little suffered this characterization as a form of defense. They posit "bystanders" as hardly less guilty than active perpetrators, and as guilty even when simultaneously "victims" in one mild way or another (Hilberg 1992; Peukert 1987; Lüdtke 1992; cf. Feyerabend 1995). Moreover it is clear that all too few scientists could hide behind this characterization, and that, despite their frequent indifference to Nazi ideology, many were centrally involved in both conceiving and executing the regime's atrocities. Historical literature has offered little exoneration to those who professed a lack of ideological commitment in carrying out their acts. As recent work on informers intimates, even if our new understanding makes it possible to "understand" such complicity all too well, those who acted with the aim of personal advancement have no moral advantage over those who acted out of ideological commitment. (Gellately 1990; Browning 1992) The same measure certainly applies to scientists whose research and practices enabled Nazi leaders to exercise their power. Finally, some have questioned how removed many scientists, particularly biologists and medical practioners, really were from Nazi ideology. (Weindling 1989; cf. Fischer 1994; Bastian and Bonhoeffer 1992; Aly et al. 1985; Klee 1983)

The ease of scientists' transition to the Nazi regime stemmed not only from the prestige the new regime offered those in certain fields. Scientists drew also on the frames of reference that informed their thinking before 1933. Historian Michael Burleigh has observed that scientists of many disciplines demonstrated a "receptivity" to potentially deadly practices long before the Nazis took power. Burleigh observes such practices not only among biologists and medical practitioners, who argued for example for forced sterilization and "euthanasia" (murder) applied to the mentally ill or retarded. He finds it also among the array of scientists whose work was spurred by turn-of-the-century "research" into occupying eastern Europe, in light of the "racially inferior" populations then residing in those lands (Burleigh 1995; Burleigh 1988; Brentjes 1992). Perhaps most important, forms of such thinking were in no way specific to Germany in the first half of the century: theories of eugenics that sound frightening to us now were legion throughout Europe as well as the United States (Cf. Broberg and Roll-Hansen 1995).

Other scientists, such as psychologists and mathematicians, found themselves entering the Third Reich with more dubious prospects for their success, related to Nazi leaders' lack of imagination concerning their potential "usefulness" (Geuter 1991; Röder 1995; Röder 1994; Weber 1993; Blasius 1991; Mehrtens 1993; Siegmund-Schultze 1993). Perhaps it is no surprise that such scholars and practitioners made it their business to demonstrate the continued importance of research and practice in their fields. Thus many psychologists embraced a new role in determining those fit to have children and even to survive. And thus mathematicians sought to outline a "social system of mathematics" that Nazi leaders might apply: a notion that, once again, predated the Third Reich (Mehrtens 1993). Mathematics educators drew on and expanded such concepts in their classroom teaching: contemporary textbooks were rife with problem sets asking young students to divide limited food resources among healthy and unhealthy populations, and to figure the probability of the passage of unhealthy genetic characteristics from one generation to the next. In this way, educators helped justify the science that informed their teaching--and in turn actively influenced researchers' own work by demonstrating paths accepted by the regime.

Indeed, the Nazi leadership was expansive in its vision of "education," seeking the most modern media to communicate its teachings, both within and outside the classroom. Radio shows, posters, film strips, and films informed Germans of the scientific validity of Nazi principles, precisely building on the notion of science's impartiality and essential "truth." Scientists helped validate this image, in this way too actively contributing to "selling murder" (Burleigh 1994: 183). Michael Burleigh analyzes the widely-viewed contemporary "documentary" propaganda film I Accuse! (Ich klage an!), in which scientists represented not only the experts who spoke the unmitigated truth, but further, clean-shaven and dressed in their spotless white coats, exemplified "fit" human beings, contrasting all too clearly with the variously marginal patients next to whom they stood throughout the film. Science education, along with scientific research, served well the state and society that supported it.

Nazi leaders' embrace of science (of what they constituted as science), along with their pioneering use of technology to broadcast this science, speaks to how we cannot view the Nazis as atavistic, mired in a romantic nostalgia, but must rather recognize the essential modernity of the regime (Herf 1984; Peukert 1987; Stöhr 1986). In this context, we can read the meshing of science, technology, ideology, and power in at least three ways: as science naturalized and substantiated the Nazi regime's power; as science informed the technologies that permitted the regime to carry out its programs including those most murderous; and as the fact of (or at least belief in) superior science and technology itself accreted power to the regime and the culture over which it reigned, permitting brutal occupation and enslavement. As to this last link, the clearest antecedents and inspirations to the "Final Solution" were probably not the 1915 genocide of Armenians nor Stalin's purges of the late 1930s, important influences but "scientifically" primitive. Rather we might look to the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century, through which its exponents, including British and French leaders, justified their acts by claiming that the very fact of technological superiority marked theirs as a superior culture, and thereby justified any acts carried out through the employ of such technology (Cf. Adas 1989). And if World War I offered the specter of uncontrolled mortality, new technologies and the ways of thinking they brought with them offered in response the possibility of more carefully controlled and managed human death (Peukert 1993; Burleigh 1994; Davis 2000). These "continuities," in addition to those above, need to be acknowledged as supporting the regime. They offer further signs moreover that the Third Reich was not unique in spurring dangerous science and technology.

There are other ways in which the role of science in Nazi society speaks to the "modernity" of the regime--and thereby to that regime's comparability to other twentieth-century government systems. The modern concept of science arose out of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution as a new means to understand, classify, and control. Beginning in the eighteenth century, science and the technology it spawned recreated society within and outside Europe. By the nineteenth century, scientific knowledge was divided into disciplines, followed by the development of a cult of expertise surrounding such knowledge and its practitioners (Foucault 1970; Cf. Haraway 1991). This was the background to the Third Reich as surely as it was to liberal capitalist regimes. Leaders of the Third Reich boasted the most fully developed technocracy ever realized; they relied on a vision of the expert scientist as an important component of Nazi authority. Scientists were likewise fully integrated into the corporatist governmental system of the Third Reich, an essential piece of the workings that held bureaucrats, military officials, industrial leaders, and other key elites together to control the regime (Hayes 1985; Stokes 1988; Stöhr 1986; Tschirner and Göbel 1992). Ultimately this technocracy was deemed as such to have been a complete failure. Historians have dubbed the Nazi state a polycracy, a dynamic system housing competing elites and rudderless party and state bureaucrats whose own petty, conflicting interests helped drive the state into the ground as well as enabling some of its most heinous practices (Mommsen 1972; Broszat 1981). Groups of scientists were among the "faceless individuals" in the state machinery.

In turn, the Nazi regime supported science (as leaders understood it) and scientists in many senses more fully than any other regime before or since. This certainly aids in questioning the longstanding notion that liberal capitalism best spawns scientific growth and development. Indeed the only possible exception to the primacy of the Nazis' support can be the competition for scientific advancement undertaken by both adversaries in the Cold War, devoted above all to the design of military destruction (Walker 1995; Stokes 1988). This brings us once more to historians' concern for continuities, not only before the Nazi regime but also afterward. For scientists as for other professionals under the regime, both in and out of Germany, April 1945 constituted a moment for realignment. Scientists' defense (insofar as they offered any) concerning their ideological neutrality and scientific objectivity held little sway with anti-Nazi prosecutors. But many scientists, including Heisenberg, were far more concerned with defending their professional status than protesting their ideological proclivilities (Walker 1995). In turn, Allied occupiers demanded little of this group relative to their former aid to the regime, in light of their perceived usefulness for the new pitched ideological battle between communism and capitalism. Science continued to be interpreted as ideologically neutral.

Scientists' postwar testimony brings to mind recent discussions by Holocaust scholars of various disciplines concerning the relationship among history, memory, facticity, perspective, and representation (Friedlander 1992; Lang 1999; Lang 2000). During and after the Third Reich, scientists employed the language of precision and facticity in which they were trained, including in defending the roles they played during the regime. (Dubois 1952: 7; Stokes 1988). Early historians tended to view such testimony as providing a "truthful" account (Cf. Lifton, as late as 1986); they often gave less credence to victims' diaries and memoirs (including those of Jewish scientists), written on the run or first after 1945. In decades past, scholars picked apart these latter writings, noting mistaken place names or an emotional tone and employing these as evidence of the unreliability of such writings as sources. Historians have cited this, moreover, as reason for choosing to write about and give voice to the perpetrators rather than to the victims. We wish to open up to question the greater truthfulness of scientists' accounts, despite this group's collective training as careful, "objective" observers. Neither the precision of these scientists' language nor their training generally gives this group any greater hold on truthfulness and completeness of perspective than those of victims or any other group recounting the events of the Third Reich.

Certainly the notion of a value-free science holds far less purchase now than it did some decades ago, including among the wider public. Yet perhaps we need to pose the questions still more forcefully in light of the example of the Third Reich: who names what as science? How is science constituted in a particular society? What constitutes knowledge more generally? (Indeed in German there is no difference in vocabulary between science and knowledge; both are Wissenschaft.) Whom does it serve, whom does it empower? What is the relationship between science production and science education? How does the latter influence the former, and how closely tied are both to the interests of any specific regime and/or set of ruling elites? In recognition of the power of science education, can such education be employed to better ask these questions and foment their active discussion?

It is not a scientist but a philosopher who offers us fresh cause to think through science and the question of continuities since the Third Reich, within and outside of Germany. Michael Burleigh considers at length the case of Peter Singer: the "extreme" animal rights activist whose proclaimed regard for life and the quality of life leads him to posit his own questions about "life worth living" and to propose an uncomfortable "practical ethics" (Burleigh 1994, 291-98). At least as significant as Singer's own ideas is the question of public debate of such ideas. Scientists in Germany attempted to close off public debate of Singer's ideas, intimating that only others like themselves possessed the sophistication to entertain the complexities of his thought. In fear of public response such as it was, German scientists ultimately cancelled their planned meetings with Singer. To be sure, the initial public response was a call for the effective repression of such ideas and even a demand that Singer leave Germany. But this clearly does not validate the scientists' solution. To shut down public discussion even of the most offensive-seeming ideas clearly does not serve the interests either of science or society. History and memory must be employed as tools to serve discussion, not cut it off.

Science Education

As we mentioned earlier, professional recommendations for science education are far from silent on the issues associated with understanding science as a human, cultural, and political enterprise. Nevertheless, young scholars in science education have begun to question the efficacy of the statements that appear in Standards and other policy and position documents. We might even go so far as to say that such statements -- amounting to little more than a verbal nod accompanying increased focus on scientific method, modernist and positivist perspectives, and fact-based curricula -- could possibly be contemporary examples of the kind of “bystander” or “fellow traveller” behaviors the historiography of Nazi science has explored. Dave Pushkin (2000), for example, describes college-level science curricula as dominated by a "traditionalist" paradigm designed for "cognitive apprenticeship" rather than "cognitive growth." In this context, science majors (including future science teachers) "learn" to accept the standard canons of knowledge, and to disregard alternative views as irrelevant, as if theories were really laws. Scientific literacy, for those enrolled in one or two college-level science courses (including all future elementary and middle school teachers who are not science majors) is defined as a measure of canonical information known, rather than as a broader, "big" picture of what science might be. Pushkin depicts syllabi constructed by traditionalists as voluminous lists of prerequisite facts, terms, and algorithms that must be mastered before any serious scientific investigation or discussion could take place. Rather than promote literacy traditionalist science effectively stupidifies (Macedo 1994) students to know a very narrow and limited scope of what science is and how it works (Pushkin 2000; Pushkin in press). Pushkin further satirizes this view of science education in the context of constructing a profession of scientists:

science is not supposed to be a process of seeking personal relevance for public understanding; it is supposed to be a special body of knowledge for pre-selected annointed beings. By mastering that special body of knowledge traditionalists assume they have the sole supreme power to understand the human implications of science and make decisions for the rest of the less-informed population. (Pushkin in press)

In effect, then, it could be said that science education as an institution preserves the prestige of a privileged elite of decision-makers by both producing that elite and establishing a reverence for science as a form of knowledge wielded by such an elite in those who never make it to the ranks of the annointed. (See also, Appelbaum & Clark in press)

Yet the last decade of public documents has consistently proclaimed a mantra of "science for all," a seemingly democratic move toward a pluralist society with an increasingly populist form of scientific literacy. Elaine Howes (1997) notes with suspicion that act of declaring such a goal without placing the goal in a socially and historically aware context. Science for All Americans (NRC 1996) constructs the historical exclusion of women and non-whites from the practice of science as the result only of forces "outside" of science itself. She further criticizes this approach as imagining that such social practices are no longer relevant. Indeed, Howes understands this as one example of a general lack of social and political awareness on the part of science education policy writers coupled with what Pushkin characterizes as a traditionalist paradigm. For example, she faults the National Science Education Standards for its portrayal of high school students as simple and naïve in their ideas about the interactions between science and society. Howes is particularly interested in promoting empathy -- one of the words generated in discussions with her students -- as a scientific virtue, in stark contrast to the Standards documents' portrayal of objectivity in scientific methods ("Reasoning can be distorted by strong feelings." (AAAS 1993: 232)

Like Elaine Howes, Jennifer Helms (1998) confronts in her own science education practice policy platitudes that are not elaborated. Her efforts are based on the "Science -Technology - Society" curriculum, grounded in the assumption that the "nature of science includes context; and that context is embedded in social, moral, and political goals." (p.127; see also Cross & Price 1992; Solomon 1994; Ramsey 1993; Waks 1992) But she is frustrated, like Pushkin, with the "relatively narrow definition of science that is considered appropriate for teachers to understand." (p. 127) Moreover, she finds STS approaches inadequately placing science in a "larger social context." Like Howes, she is searching for a pedagogy that can embrace the importance of the relationships as part of science, not just as outside forces. For her, this implies an ethic of care and responsible action: "I believe that the goals of science education ought to include transformation of the sciences, and part of that transformation needs to include movement towards more socially just and responsible science" (Helms 1998: 148)

The transformation of "science" called for in these pedagogical moments is at once a node of possibility and a source of anxiety or conflict over what exactly science "is." Pushkin calls for a different form of college-level experience in order for "science" to be possible in school environments. Howes and Helms actively promote new forms of science instruction; Howes, immersed in feminist science education, constructs her students as authorities; Helms, applying service learning projects to STS education, brings her students to the wetlands for a long-term study of local scientific questions and problems. Barton (1998) takes this one step further. Working with homeless children at their shelter, she asks, what indeed does it mean to be committed to "science for all," and, in the process, she wonders if what they have done together -- clearly a valuable educational experience for all -- can, still, be called "science." It certainly is science for the children involved, but it is so removed from school science as we know it that it is difficult to know anymore where the boundary between science and not-science can be drawn. Karen Gallas (1994), on the other hand, suggests that teachers accept science as what the students label science, and watch over time as the children's expression of that science slowly evolves into something that the adult can understand; it is up to the teacher, she writes, to learn from the child what that science is.

Yet, what science is, and what teachers and students produce together as science, remains a fairly atheorized component of science education curriculum. By leaving the nature of science and the role of science unquestioned, science education continues to judge such issues as best left to the "experts", receiving its agenda from governmental policy and ideological commitments. In response, science educators have sought to establish theorizing about science and its interaction with community as a prominent feature of science education practices. Margery Osborne (1999) posits four interwoven and inseparable goals: design, pattern, method, and community. She strives to embed a constant critical confrontation with ourselves in the pursuit of science education. Like Gallas (1995) and Calabrese and Barton, she listens intently to what the children define as science. But central to her scientific discussion and investigations is a perpetual attention to "critical consciousness" (an awareness or questioning of context and the process of differentiation). Osborne's notion of design places this critical consciousness in the interplay of foreground and background, never allowing the background to be lost. Also, by recognizing action by design as purposeful and expressing need, this consciousness in Osborne's pedagogy calls attention to assumptions underlying "needs." She enacts in her work a critical awareness of science as a form of "explanation," and a vehicle of "design" itself. Throughout, she moreover attends to the place of community in supporting and being changed by science.

If we can remember to critically confront ourselves with things we can't do with the foreground, we can remind ourselves of those decisions; remind ourselves of the things we have excluded, and reconstruct the foreground/background relationships and the assumptions buried within the relationship. (Osborne 1999: 230)

We suggest that one way to destabilize the foreground/background relationship is by persistently challenging any one story with an alternative. To understand the science that is being practiced from a variety of positions at once can challenge our tendency to construct a monolithic and privileged position that ranks others as less in value, and this is worthwhile in spite of or even because of the troublesome issues alternative versions may raise (Cf., Harding 1993; Third World Network 1993). In setting up science as situated knowledge (Weinstein in press), as inherently one of conflict and power as well as a vision of progress, we can bring to that science new forms of theory and practice. And, by working with pedagogies that avoid the pitfalls of "one true story" we can work against what Annette Gough refers to as the dangers of scientists "being unconscious" (Gough, A. 1998).

Science Education’s Responsibilities

Contemporary Holocaust curriculum materials occasionally make an effort to extend thematic connections to science topics. When they do, however, it is usually a superficial, tangential connection. The opening epigraph drawn from Holocaust education materials gives evidence of the best of these curricula, clearly limited and less compelling than the kind of problems educators routinely assigned under the Third Reich. Indeed, the disinclination is clear: these materials often suggest that "Nazi science" is not appropriate for a school audience. “if teachers wish to discuss Nazi ‘science’ with their students, it would be better to do so in the context of a social studies unit as another example of the Nazi dehumanization of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled.” (Quenk 1997: 81) The role of scientists is either recommended as best left unexamined for its gruesomeness, or obversely reduced to its most gruesome, that is, the medical experiments performed in concentration camps (see, e.g., Willis 1997). Science is not important in most of the existing curricula, because holocaust and genocide studies are usually conceived as social studies and literature. This is why science education itself must take the responsibility for the heritage that science has willed to our society. This is a "lesson" learned from the Nazi state itself: that science and science education are constituted by and also constitutive of the ideological commitments and the development of political structures in a given society. If we are to promote a democratic, post-holocaust society, then science must be part of that societal commitment. Key to the creation of a coherent science education are three interwoven areas of curricular theorizing: the relationship between science and society; continuities and discontinuities in scientists' positions relative to social dynamics; and the representation, education, and dissemination of science itself.

Science learning and instruction must include the critical analysis of science as a practice. Historical studies of the political and cultural role of science need to be integrated into this instruction. Students should interrogate contemporary institutions of science for their potential to fall into a self-legitimizing authoritarianism, presuming the unique ability to police themselves. (Contrast Peter Singer's bizarrely optimistic view of scientists' potential for effective self-policing (Burleigh 1988, 298).) They should construct for themselves (and imagine on larger scales) forms of self-monitoring for the promotion of diversity and openness to new ideas. Students might study historical examples of the state's role in enabling science to develop in certain ways; they should also explore the deference of contemporary science practices to state, corporate, and other interests. They should design their own investigations to include an ongoing strand of societal responsibility, empathy and caring.

Narratives of continuity describe science as contributing to the forms of modernity and technocracy that enabled eugenics and even genocide, as well as promoting reverence for privileged scientific authority. It is crucial that students and teachers explore the underlying premises of science and the pursuit of science in this light. For much of its history, science promised human "control" over life and death. The ability to determine and maintain what constitutes a "good" life were clearly central to the scientific enterprise long before the Nazis came to power. This centrality continues in the form of "designer babies," genetically modified and irradiated foods, personality drugs, and the "virtual reality" of Gulf War-style weaponry. Other scientific efforts promote the "good life" as controlling and exploiting natural resources, as in offshore natural gas exploration, or by defining security in terms of AIDS-testing of immigrants. How current school practices perpetuate these continuities, and how they challenge them, should be articulated by and for both teachers and students. The unarticulated, "hidden" promises of science need equal attention as students and teachers challenge their, and others', perceptions of the ideals that drive their work.

The image of the scientist and her or his role in such continuities must also be studied. Mass media present science as positive in its contributions, even as technological consequences are relived in fantasies of apocalypse (Appelbaum 1998). Classroom education easily supports ideal representations while ignoring the popular culture enactments of fear and crisis, even striving to develop rationales that legitimate a particular discipline's importance through its utility--political, ideological, or economic. Scientists remain "fellow travelers" as they continue their dependence on state or corporate support. They continue to justify their projects as serving their own societies' presumed interests as they formulate funding proposals and lobby for adequate research facilities. Indeed, contemporary science education has been faulted for representing the work of scientists as a myth that never existed, as tinkering at a bench, whereas scientists today spend most of their time pursuing grants, writing accountability reports, and competing for expensive computer time (Gough, N. 1998). The alternative, distanced position scientists might take -- "I'm just doing my work," "My work advances physics for its own sake" -- is merely another "bystander" version that has no better moral credibility. The point for school science is not to cultivate students as scientists in either position, but to create skepticism about both roles, and make it possible for science to be practiced in ways that acknowledge and attempt to work through the conflicts identified by different publics. In all these areas, teachers and students can and should spearhead broad discussion and debate, never accepting science practice as fixed or necessarily positive, rather working to enact changes in science accordingly.

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Biographical Statements

Belinda Davis teaches modern European history and women's studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. She is the author of Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). She is currently writing a book on public responses to radical left activism in West Germany, 1960-1980.

Peter Appelbaum teaches curriculum theory and mathematics, science, and technology education at William Paterson University. He is co-editor with John Weaver and Marla Morris of (Post) Modern Science (Education) (NY: Peter Lang, 2000), and the author of Popular Culture, Educational Discourse, and Mathematics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).

Post-Holocaust Science Education

Belinda Davis & Peter Appelbaum

Difficult Memories: Talk in a (Post) Holocaust Era. Marla Morris and John Weaver (eds.)171-190. Peter Lang, 2001.

Nazi Science

Science Education

Science Education’s Responsibilities