For several years now the CSN and the FTQ have organized workshops on occupational safety and health. These sessions are aimed at informing and promoting awareness among workers, as well as mobilizing and organizing around issues and actions leading to the improvement of working conditions. The sessions are built...
Tag - science education
Educational testing in America has become a cradle-to-grave arbiter of social and economic mobility. Tests determine who succeeds and who fails, who receives remedial or enrichment services, who goes to college or graduate school, who has his or her way paid, and who practices medicine, law or the other prestigious...
A primary objective of those in control within a society is to stay in control. Most institutions and organized activities within society function to serve the purposes of the ruling class. One of the primary institutions for maintaining, consolidating, and increasing control over people is the educational system. An...
At the end of the first semester a proposal was made by a group of teachers: instead of giving another semester of general biology to the freshman class, why not offer areas or study which differed in content, so that students would have some choice in their scientific curriculum, and we could thereby pursue our own...
In the last few years many of us have begun to question various aspects of our jobs as teachers. In part this has been due to an awakening consciousness among all teachers about the authoritarian nature of schools and the socializing function they perform. It has been due also to the broad recognition now that...
In a recent issue of Science for the People, the Science Teaching Group offered a critique of science courses in the schools1 The critique emphasized the role of traditional science education in maintaining the economic and social status quo. This is accomplished by fostering the myth of an apolitical, benevolent...
In the classroom, the myth of an apolitical, benevolent science prevails. The training of a scientist involves a total submersion in technical material with little if any, historical or philosophical perspective. Research productivity is the measure of worth, as the student acquires skill in a specialized field...
The educational system is one of the most important means by which the power of the ruling class in this country is maintained. This process can be seen very clearly in science education. (For a more detailed statement of this position and some of the reasoning behind it, see the excerpts of our pamphlet printed in...
The January 1972 issue of Science for the People suggested that there was an interest in seeing an issue on "Science Teaching from a Radical Perspective," and with the appropriate back-to-school month staring us in the face, we looked at each other and said, "Hey, let's put out an issue on science teaching from a...