MARK SLOUKA
Mark Slouka (b. 1958), a Guggenheim Fellowship winner (2005), has published six books, including War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality (1995) and more recently Brewster: A Novel (2013). Slouka is also a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine, where this work was published in September 2009. Taken from a larger essay called “Dehumanized,” this excerpt argues that the current educational emphasis on teaching math and science is, in fact, antidemocratic and potentially harmful in the long run.
Mathandscience
Nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant.
— Dennis Overbye
Nothing speaks more clearly to the relentlessly vocational bent in American education than its long-running affair with math and science. I say “affair” because I am kind; in truth, the relationship is obsessive, exclusionary, altogether unhealthy. Whatever the question, math and science (so often are they spoken of in the same breath, they’ve begun to feel singular) are, or is, the answer. They make sense; they compute. They’re everything we want: a solid return on capital investment, a proven route to “success.” Everything else can go fish.
Do we detect a note of bitterness, a hint of jealousy? No doubt. There’s something indecent about the way math and science gobble up market share. Not content with being heavily subsidized by both government and private industry and with serving as a revenue-generating gold mine for higher education (which pockets the profits from any patents and passes on research expenses to students through tuition increases — effectively a kind of hidden “science tax”), math and science are now well on the way to becoming the default choice for anyone having trouble deciding where to park his (or the taxpayers’) money, anyone trying to burnish his no-nonsense educational bona fides, or, most galling, anyone looking for a way to demonstrate his or her civic pride.
But let me be clear: I write this not to provide tinder to our latter-day inquisitors, ever eager to sacrifice the spirit of scientific inquiry in the name of some new misapprehension. That said, I see no contradiction between my respect for science and my humanist’s discomfort with its ever-greater role in American culture, its ever-burgeoning coffers, its often dramatically anti-democratic ways, its symbiotic relationship with government, with industry, with our increasingly corporate institutions of higher learning. Triply protected from criticism by the firewall of their jargon (which immediately excludes the non-specialist and assures a jury of motivated and sympathetic peers), their economic efficacy, and the immunity conferred by conveniently associated terms like “progress” and “advancement,” the sciences march, largely untouched, under the banner of the inherently good.1 And this troubles me.
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It troubles me because there are many things “math and science” do well, and some they don’t. And one of the things they don’t do well is democracy. They have no aptitude for it, no connection to it, really. Which hasn’t prevented some in the sciences from arguing precisely the opposite, from assuming even this last, most ill-fitting mantle, by suggesting that science’s spirit of questioning will automatically infect the rest of society.
5 In fact, it’s not so. Science, by and large, keeps to its reservation, which explains why scientists tend to get in trouble only when they step outside the lab.2 That no one has ever been sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant is precisely to the point. The work of democracy involves espousing those values that in a less democratic society would get one sent to prison. To maintain its “sustainable edge,” a democracy requires its citizens to actually risk something, to test the limits of the acceptable; the “trajectory of capability-building” they must devote themselves to, above all others, is the one that advances the capability for making trouble. If the value you’re espousing is one that could never get anyone, anywhere, sent to prison, then strictly democratically speaking you’re useless.
All of this helps explain why, in today’s repressive societies, the sciences do not come in for the same treatment as the humanities. Not only are the sciences, with a few notable exceptions, politically neutral; their specialized languages tend to segregate them from the wider population, making ideological contagion difficult. More importantly, their work, quite often, is translatable into “product,” which any aspiring dictatorship recognizes as an unambiguous good, whereas the work of the humanities almost never is.
To put it simply, science addresses the outer world; the humanities, the inner one. Science explains how the material world is now for all men; the humanities, in their indirect, slippery way, offer the raw materials from which the individual constructs a self — a self distinct from others. The sciences, to push the point a bit, produce people who study things, and who can therefore, presumably, make or fix or improve these things. The humanities don’t.
One might, then, reasonably expect the two, each invaluable in its own right, to operate on an equal footing in the United States, to receive equal attention and respect. Not so. In fact, not even close. From the Sputnik-inspired emphasis on “science and math” to the pronouncements of our recently retired “Education President” (the jury is still out on Obama), the call is always for more investment in “math and science.” And then a little more. The “American Competitiveness Initiative” calls for doubling federal spending on basic research grants in the physical sciences over ten years, at a cost of $50 billion. The federal government is asked to pay the cost of finding 30,000 new math and science teachers. Senator Bill Frist pushes for grants for students majoring in math and science.
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Whether the bias trickles down or percolates up, it’s systemic. The New York City Department of Education announces housing incentives worth up to $15,000 to lure teachers “in math and science” to the city’s schools. Classes in history and art and foreign languages are cut back to make room for their more practical, “rigorous” cousins. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute announces its selection of twenty new professors who will use their million-dollar grants to develop fresh approaches to teaching science. Nothing remotely comparable exists in the humanities.
10 Popular culture, meanwhile, plays backup, cementing bias into cliché. Mathandscience becomes the all-purpose shorthand for intelligence; it has that all-American aura of money about it. The tax collector, to recall Mayakovsky, runs the show.
Why does Mark Slouka compress math and science into one word: “mathandscience”? What is the effect of doing this as it relates to his broader arguments?
In paragraph 1, Slouka calls American education’s attraction to math and science an “affair.” (He also uses the word “jealousy” in para. 2.) Given that an affair refers to an illicit romantic or sexual relationship, is the use of this metaphor appropriate? Why, or why not?
Slouka argues that science is “dramatically anti-democratic” (para. 3). What is the basis for his claim? Do you agree or disagree? Why?
In paragraph 5, Slouka writes, “Science, by and large, keeps to its reservation, which explains why scientists tend to get in trouble only when they step outside the lab.” What does he mean by this? Is there a sense that science operates behind a veil of secrecy? How does this relate to his argument that science is antidemocratic?
Also in paragraph 5, Slouka argues that “[t]he work of democracy involves espousing those values that in a less democratic society would get one sent to prison” [italics are the author’s]. In your opinion, is this a fair definition of the work of democracy? Provide specific examples to support your position.
Slouka argues in paragraph 6 that the sciences are mostly “politically neutral” and contrasts that with the humanities, which can be dangerous to authoritarian regimes. Research examples of artists, musicians, writers, dancers, and academics in the humanities who lived in authoritarian nations, such as the former Soviet Union. How did they represent a threat to the established order? What happened to them?
To what extent does the privileging of the sciences in the United States echo the privileging of the sciences in authoritarian nations? Is this ultimately a threat to freedom in the United States? Why, or why not? Support your answer.
Slouka speaks about money in much of this excerpt; after all, money that flows into the sciences is money that is not going into the humanities. He mentions federal spending on research grants, money for new math and science teachers, grants for students to major in math and science (paras. 8–9). In your opinion, is this inequitable funding justified? Why, or why not?
Underneath much of Slouka’s argument is an old idea about the value of the humanities: that the study of the humanities improves people’s lives — and by extension, the society that embraces the humanities as well. Or, as Slouka puts it: “science addresses the outer word; the humanities, the inner one” (para. 7). Is this a romantic notion that public education can no longer afford to support, or does it still have validity? Support your answer.
In the final paragraph, Slouka refers to popular culture as supporting science, at least in the sense that the scientist is perceived as very intelligent, others less so. Does this correspond with your own experiences and observations with popular culture and its approaches to the sciences and the humanities? Be specific. (You may also wish to read the poem “Talking with the Taxman about Poetry” by Vladimir Mayakovsky, alluded to in the final sentence, to get additional thoughts on the subject.)
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