Questions with...
Thomas Professor Paul Harris
by Meghan V. Joyce
Thomas Professor Paul Harris
(Photo by Jill Anderson)
Q:Your background is in developmental psychology. How did you become interested in scientific and religious learning?
A: was influenced by-and, to some extent, reacting against-various metaphors that are used in developmental psychology to study cognitive development in children. One influential metaphor is to think of the child as an informal scientist who increasingly develops theories about various domains- whether it's biology or psychology or cosmology-and moves toward a more objective, rational conception of the way things really are. In some ways that is a helpful metaphor, but it seems to ignore some key aspects of human cognition.
First of all, if we look at science as a kind of institutionalized enterprise, it's pretty recent in human history-from the 15th or 16th century onward, depending on what criteria you use. If we think about other intellectual activities of human beings, particularly religion, we can trace signs of those back 30,000 to 40,000 years. So in some ways, science is a last-minute blip in human history, whereas preoccupation with metaphysical and religious issues is a longstanding preoccupation.
So, if one is asking what the fundamental nature of human cognition is, child development has been inclined to ignore science. If anything, children might find certain aspects of religion and metaphysics somewhat easier.
Q: Have the ways in which children learn about science changed over time as science and technology have developed?
A: In the past, science was conveyed to children primarily through the written word, with occasional diagrams and illustrations. These days, the information that flows to children is increasingly virtual rather than propositional. By way of computer games or science programs or multimedia series such as the Magic School Bus, children can explore in a virtual world some of the claims that are being made by science. So in some ways, the gap between the nature of their encounters with firsthand experience and the nature of their encounters with secondhand experience has been reduced. It's as if they can move more easily from firsthand to secondhand, because secondhand is becoming increasingly like a virtual facsimile of firsthand experience.
Q: In your article "Trust in Testimony," you argue that "children who grow up in communities where the existence of extraordinary beings.is more or less universally presupposed will regard those special beings as having an ontological status that is just as secure as natural kinds." Given this information, how should public schools or communities approach the idea of creation or intelligent design?
A: I think this issue is slightly orthogonal to the psychological evidence about how children think. Let me try and spell out what I mean. The controversy about intelligent design is considerably more heated in the United States than it is in, for example, most countries in Western Europe. In fact, I can't think of a country in Western Europe that has gone through the travails that the United States has. So I think, if anything, the answer to what to do in America has to be based not so much on child psychology, which one assumes is relatively stable in those diff erent countries, but probably has to be informed much more by a consideration of the American legal and educational systems.
One relatively important feature of the American education system is that there's a considerable amount of local control dealing with wide-ranging educational policy. There are important questions about how one operates in a country that has a very diverse population with a very diverse set of religious practices and a tradition that has emphasized local and states' rights in relation to a set of universal scientific ideas. The answer has to be sought via legal and political debate, and I'm not sure that the psychology of the child is going to yield a tidy answer.
Q: How would you suggest that teachers approach evolution with students who have a commitment to intelligent design or creation?
A: I think that a student who emphasizes issues of design deserves to be taken seriously because, if we look at the reception of Darwinian theory, the preoccupation with the apparent design in nature was hugely important. After all, many of Darwin's contemporaries and critics found it difficult to accept his claims because of all the evidence that seemed to support design in nature.
If anything, it seems to me that such students should be engaged with seriously, and the discussion should focus on the extent to which apparently random processes can produce organs in species that appear to be designed and well-adapted. I'm not necessarily advocating that we go so far as to have statements read in the classroom about intelligent design and its alleged explanatory value, but it does seem to me that a thoughtful teacher wouldn't dismiss out of hand a student who worries about those issues. The teacher should bear in mind there have been longstanding anxieties on the part of many of Darwin's highly intelligent and respected critics.
Q: Do you think that current science education takes into account all that we know about children's imaginations or how children learn science, and if not, how could it be improved?
A: My own research would lead me to think it's a huge dilemma. On the one hand, it's not as if children can replicate for themselves vast bodies of scientific information. They are obliged to simply trust in many aspects of the curriculum. And by saying that, I'm not trying to imply that educators go too far or don't honor children's intellectual abilities when they provide them with this information. It seems to me, part of what we are as human beings depends absolutely critically on our ability to take information from other people and to envisage places and ways to experience it that we ourselves have not personally witnessed. I mean, that's what a great deal of fi ction and drama is about. It's what certain aspects of science are also about.
So I'm not saying that we should steer away from telling children what scientists claim and focus insistently on children's capacity to discover things for themselves, which is often a message that you get from certain constructivist branches of education. However, [speaking] as an educator, as a student, and as an advisor to several generations of students, there is something magical and important about the experience of building knowledge for yourself. So the senior-year thesis or the doctoral dissertation or the eighth-grade project is clearly absolutely vital for children, perhaps not so much for the specific discoveries or insights at which they arrive, but more for the further wideranging and important lesson that many branches of knowledge are under construction and under reconstruction and under re-reconstruction-and that one of the great joys of being educated is participating in that process.
So on the one hand, we have to hand children what we know, but we also have to give children the opportunity to experience what it is to gradually know something and to figure it out for themselves or in collaboration with one or two other people or a group of people if you're working as a team. I would say that science education has to try to marry those two somewhat opposing desiderata.
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
For More Information
More information about Paul Harris is available in the Faculty Profiles.
