A Radical Science Education: The Entangled Histories of Sociobiology, Post-Genomics, and Science Fiction

• In Event: De-signing Science Education in the Anthropocene

Abstract

In 1937 the so-called father of modern science fiction, H. G. Wells (1966, 1063), presented a paper to the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s Educational Science Section. Wells envisioned an education system that taught children about the world by providing a foundation in scientific knowledge through natural experience, informed by the latest advances in science and technology. He rejected the existing nationalistic curriculum focused on the scandals and revenges of British royalty and instead proposed a transnational scientific curriculum that taught students about the diverse ways humans and nonhumans negotiate their way through the world.

Wells was a socialist and revolutionary, he believed strongly that educational reform was fundamental to the social evolution of man, so much so that he declared: “human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe”. Wells’ SF novels not only predicted the coming world wars – including the use of tanks, chemical warfare, and the atomic bomb – but also provided a prophetic warning for the Anthropocene, which he viewed as the inevitable result of man’s complacent and yet negligent mastery of nature.

Almost a century later we find ourselves at a similar juncture in history, on the precipice of a global catastrophe fueled by extractive capitalism and poorly regulated technological advancements, which have accompanied and exacerbated social, cultural, racial, economic, political and militaristic inequalities. Drawing on Wells’ visionary texts, social critique, and revolutionary insights, this presentation revisits and recontextualizes questions raised by Wells almost a century ago around the adequacy of science curricula to grapple with the still unfolding Anthropocene. I deploy the methodological practice of “diffractive play” (see Adsit-Morris & Gough 2020) by reading selected fictional, theoretical, scientific and policy texts/discourses diffractively through each other in order to undo pervasive conceptions, trouble linear temporal logics, and foster collective imaginaries around what might yet still be possible.

I begin by exploring the technological advances in molecular biology that have occurred over the last twenty years that have instigated an epistemological turn towards what is called the post-genomic era, which not only entails a reconceptualization of scientific understandings of genes, genomes and genetics, but the rise of biocapitalism, the commercialization of genetics, and the resurrection of a genetics of race (see Keller 2015). I situate current education research and policy within the post-genomic era through new research in the field of sociobiology and US educational reform measures including Obama’s “Race to the Top” competition and “Educate to Innovate” campaign aimed at integrating the private sector into public education. Instead, this paper diffractively explores the re-emergence of Science for the People (2018), a radical group of scientists who emerged in the 1970s and took direct action against war, racism, sexism, and capitalism, challenging the scientific establishment’s claims to political neutrality. Drawing on a number of personal experiences teaching undergraduate evolutionary biology, I explore the potential to create a “radical science education” through social and environmental justice focused citizen science projects.

Author

• Chessa Adsit-Morris, University of California - Santa Cruz