Connected knowledge

by Alan H. Cromer

The vast intellectual chasm separating the scientific community and its postmodern academic critics was dramatically exposed when physicist Alan Sokal revealed that his spoof of postmodernist gibberish had been published as genuine by the postmodernist journal Social Text. In Connected Knowledge, physicist Alan Cromer shows that this chasm also separates scientists from science educators, who often don't share a common understanding of scientific principles or philosophy. Cromer offers a way to bridge this chasm, with a lively account of scientific thinking and a provocative new agenda for American education. Science, Cromer argues, is anything but common sense: It requires a particular habit of mind that does not come naturally. Today's de-emphasis on teaching pupils necessary facts and principles, he argues, "far from empowering them, makes them slaves of their own subjective opinions." This movement in education, known as Constructivism, has close ties to postmodern critics (such as