Connected knowledge

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 the editors of Social Text) who question the objectivity of science, and with it the existence of an objective reality. Cromer offers a ringing defense of the knowability of the world, both as an objective reality and as a finite landscape of discovery. The advance of scientific knowledge, he argues, is not unlike the mapping of the continents; at this point, we have found them all. He shows how the advent of quantum mechanics, rather than making knowledge less certain, actually offers a more precise understanding of the behavior of atoms and electrons. The uncertainty principle can't be used as an excuse for allowing students to flounder, however creatively, with activities that have no clear purpose or goal. Schools must develop coherent curricula that advance students' understanding in an orderly manner, and Cromer offers practical suggestions on how this might be done. Connected Knowledge, however, goes much farther. As a discipline that insists upon connecting theory with measurable reality, physical science offers a new direction for reforming the social sciences. Cromer also shows how some of the hottest issues in public policy - including the debates over special education and group variations in I.Q., can be resolved through clear, hardheaded thinking.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Philosophy. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.