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The Pedagogical Implications of Popular (Culture) Science: Reggae Music, Vanilla Sky[TM] & Minority Report[TM] as Poststructural Scientific Curriculum

2005; Routledge; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1057-896X

Paul R. Geisler,

Science Education and Perceptions

On a wild goose chase Laws of nature they just can't face Ambition is mash up the place Who shall save the human race? These times of science and technology This world is an unconscious lavatory Using my people as guinea pigs --Wild Goose Chase David Hinds & Steel Pulse (1985) Mind, not space, is science's final --John Horgan, The End of Science, (1996, p. 159) In the song Wild Goose Chase, British reggae band Steel Pulse bemoans the current and future states of the human condition by bringing into question contemporary society's insatiable lust for the inherently wondrous potential and perceived reality of science & technology (1985). This social and politically conscious song explicitly critiques various man made scientific technologies and advancements, like the neutron bomb, test tube babies, population control pharmacopoeia, robots, biological cloning and transgenic food production; while rhetorically wondering how the human race has managed persevere despite the myriad technoscientific follies that we have committed against our habitus. Despite all that man has done its' self, Mother Nature and her natural family, this critical popular culture text questions how it is that all forms of Earthly life have not yet been snuffed out; while also wondering aloud if mankind has even begun learn from the mistakes and misgressions that have been committed in the name of objective science. From the tone of this song, one might also speculate if humans are even capable of learning from their mistakes, their limitations, and their seemingly unrecognized weaknesses. Perhaps even more curiously, the song also wonders aloud about the shape and form of future technoscientific developments that may actually be responsible for scientifically generating our own annihilation and destruction? In short, Steel Pulse artistically critiques modern society's naive and myopic reliance on science and technology; and in so doing finds it incredulous that we have not yet incited the prophetic Armageddon that will effectively snuff out all life forms on earth. Or, have we? In The End of Science (1996), John Horgan, a former senior writer for Scientific American, makes use of the opinions and works of many of today's leading scientists synthesize an argument that big science as we have come know it, is as dead as Nietzsche's God. In introducing what he calls Ironic Science, Horgan presents two fundamental, but also contradicting reasons for the static and somewhat necrotic state of contemporary science as a major knowledge-producing venture (p. 7). Specifically, he argues that science has become ironic because a) science has been so successful at problems that it no longer has significant problems left solve, and b) that the last frontier of science, the human mind, is virtually insolvable (at least by science alone that is). Paradoxically then, if science were successful at solving perhaps the most vexing problem that philosophy, religion, physics, biology and psychology have faced date, the link between mind and matter, then science indeed would be considered to have come an end (Horgan, p. 3). If though, as some scholars believe, the theory of the mind is indeed unsolvable, perhaps big science and the great era of scientific discovery has already come an end. In this case, the questions generated by philosophy pertain the current role, purpose, and quest of science and scientists, and simultaneously towards the anxiety-ridden questions pertaining the purpose of life and humanity. As a sixth generation of American students now endures a curriculum based largely on Western, Eurocentric notions of objective, empirical knowledge, and one steeped in Tylerian and behaviorist paradigms, it can be argued that much of the modern citizenship (the consumers of science) possesses a rather myopic, homogenous, and linear perspective of science's purpose, power, and future. …