Scientific literacy and Arnold B. Arons

Discriminate, on the one hand, between acceptance of asserted and unverified end results, models, or conclusions, and, on the other understand their basis and origin; that is, to recognize when questions such as "How do we know . . . ? Why do we believe . . .? What is the evidence for . . . ?" have been addressed, answered, and understood, and when something is being taken on faith.

Esta es una de las habilidades que un individuo que haya conseguido un cierto grado de "scientific literacy" debe tener, de acuerdo a Arons. Me parece interesante tratar de entender, a partir de la biografía de Arons, muchos de sus puntos de vista (además de algunos anecdotas soprendentes):

After graduating from the Stevens Institute of Technology with an M.E. degree in 1937 and an M.S. in 1940, Arons attended Harvard University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1943. The degrees were all in physical chemistry.

Many alumni of that era look back on Arons's physics course with mixed feelings. Fondness may not always be one of them: Physics 1-2 was a grueling experience for the scientifically inept, and Arons was famous for not suffering student deficiencies gladly (he is widely remembered for locking the lecture room door the exact minute his early-morning class began, so that tardy students missed crucial lectures and assignments). Arons was a strong believer in core requirements. Of Physics 1-2 he once said, "Any measure of success the course attains is predicated upon the pragmatic fact that we are dealing with a captive audience. Within this context, we can bring sufficient pressure upon the students to have them exert the necessary effort and acquire some intellectual momentum."

If Arons intimidated many students, he entertained them as well. He brought a strong sense of theater to his classroom demonstrations. To show how a neutron behaves in a nuclear bomb, for instance, he would ask someone to drop a Ping-Pong ball into a large wire cage set with mousetraps. Controlled pandemonium followed as the ball ricocheted madly around the container.

Well beyond Amherst, Arons was recognized for his highly original teaching. He once summarized his approach in a letter to Amherst. "I knew how frequently freshmen tended to confuse technical jargon with knowledge and how frequently they failed to distinguish between the name and the idea (‘the map is not the territory')," he wrote. "We therefore operated under the precept ‘idea first and name afterwards' and explicitly emphasized operationalism.

"Freshmen took scientific terms, constructs, and theories so literally that it was essential to shift this orientation and lead them to perceive the role of metaphor. We found it necessary to give students the opportunity to discriminate between observation and inference since, initially, the capacity for such discrimination was quite weak."