Kevin Donnelly: Adding Indigenous understanding to STEM a curriculum fail
The boffins who decide what our kids learn are turning science classes into lessons in political correctness.
Opinion
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The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has announced schools are being asked to incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scientific understanding in science, technology and mathematics subjects.
In the same way indigenous history, culture and spirituality are now embedded in history, English and civics and citizenship classes, teachers will now be asked to include cross-curriculum indigenous priorities in STEM subjects across all year levels.
The justification for putting indigenous science on the same footing as Western science is that teachers need to “provide a more culturally responsive curriculum”.
Schools are also told that “it is crucial that our curriculum effectively includes respect and understanding of 65,000-plus years of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history”.
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Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, provides further justification when arguing that Australia’s indigenous peoples “have explored the many wonders of our continent for millennia” and “through their rich enduring legacy, we can inspire the same instinct to explore in our students today”.
Not surprisingly the Commonwealth Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion, is a strong supporter of this latest example of cultural sensitivity.
He extols ACARA’s work as “groundbreaking” and suggests that “incorporating traditional knowledge developed over a millennia into modern scientific teaching is not only a huge privilege for Australian students, but will also enhance our own scientific thinking”.
To assist teachers ACARA has published 95 elaborations to illustrate how they can “combine the best of Indigenous and Western scientific understanding” in a way that respects “cultural appropriateness”.
ACARA also argues that the elaborations will illustrate how “Indigenous history, culture, knowledge and understanding can be incorporated into teaching core scientific concepts”.
Examples of the elaborations include students recognising Indigenous “knowledge and understanding of solids, liquids and gases (for example, application of steam for cooking)”.
Students could also look at “changes of state in materials used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, such as beeswax or resins.”
Teachers are also told that students “can investigate some of the chemical reactions and methods employed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to convert plants into edible food products”.
At a time when Australian students are going backwards in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests one would expect, instead of this latest example of PC cultural sensitivity, that ACARA would focus on ensuring the existing curriculum is academically rigorous and based on the established disciplines.
Namely, disciplines that incorporate the best of Western scientific research and thinking and that can be traced back through the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment to the early Roman and Greek scientists, mathematicians and philosophers.
Contrary to what those responsible for the national curriculum think, Western scientific thought, based as it is on rationality, reason and empiricism, is not culturally determined.
As argued by Professor Igor Bray in his submission to the 2014 national curriculum review, “science knows nothing about the nationality or ethnicity of its participants, and this is its great unifying strength”.
Bray goes on to argue “scientific statements are those that are able to be falsified by empirical evidence, and that scientific facts are not logical truths but those statements that have not yet been falsified despite repeated experiments. There is no room for cultural sensitivity”.
It should also be recognised that ACARA’s decision to equate Indigenous science with Western science is not new. This relativistic approach was adopted by the 1993 South Australian curriculum where it states, “every culture has its own way of thinking and its world views to inform its science. Western science is the most dominant form of science but it is only one form among the sciences of the world’’.
As argued by James Anthony Gibbons in On Reflection equating all sciences as equally deserving respect ignores the fact that Western science is pre-eminent in its ability to help us better understand and deal with our physical environment. This is primarily because Western science is not based on superstition or witchcraft as it involves a unique scientific process, one that Gibbons suggests involves “testing explanations against the physical world and, depending on their success in accounting for that physical world, may be accepted as a step in the search for truth”.
Treating science as culturally determined ignores that some approaches better approximate the truth compared to others.
As argued by Warren Mundine, “what is Indigenous physics? Physics is physics” and “the idea that you have to have an indigenous or Asian perspective, to be frank, is silly”.
This latest egregious example of how political correctness is dumbing down the school curriculum beggars belief but given the cultural-left’s control over what is taught in the nation’s classrooms nothing should surprise.
Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and author of How Political Correctness Is Destroying Education (Wilkinson Publishing).