Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more - or so we think. But what if all this is simply wrong? What if the benefits we assume science education produces turn out to be an illusion, nothing more than wishful thinking? In Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should), former high school teacher and historian of science education John L. Rudolph examines the reasons we've long given for teaching science and assesses how they hold up to what we know about what students really learn (or don't learn) in science classrooms and what research tells us about how people actually interact with science in their daily lives. The results will surprise you. Instead of more and more rigorous traditional science education to fill the STEM pipeline, Rudolph challenges us to think outside the box and makes the case for an expansive science education aimed instead at rebuilding trust between science and the public - something we desperately need in our current era of impending natural challenges and science denial.

A former Wisconsin high school science teacher makes the case that how and why we teach science matters, especially now that its legitimacy is under attack. Why teach science? The answer to that question will determine how it is taught. Yet despite the enduring belief in this country that science should be taught, there has been no enduring consensus about how or why. This is especially true when it comes to teaching scientific process. Nearly all of the basic knowledge we have about the world is rock solid. The science we teach in high schools in particular-laws of motion, the structure of the atom, cell division, DNA replication, the universal speed limit of light-is accepted as the way nature works. Everyone also agrees that students and the public more generally should understand the methods used to gain this knowledge. But what exactly is the scientific method? Ever since the late 1800s, scientists and science educators have grappled with that question. Through the years, they've advanced an assortment of strategies, ranging from "the laboratory method" to the "five-step method" to "science as inquiry" to no method at all. How We Teach Science reveals that each strategy was influenced by the intellectual, cultural, and political circumstances of the time. In some eras, learning about experimentation and scientific inquiry was seen to contribute to an individual's intellectual and moral improvement, while in others it was viewed as a way to minimize public interference in institutional science. John Rudolph shows that how we think about and teach science will either sustain or thwart future innovation, and ultimately determine how science is perceived and received by the public.

In response to Soviet advances in science and engineering education, the country’s top scientists with the support of the federal government in 1956 launched an unprecedented program to reform pre-college science education in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, John Rudolph traces the origins of two of the leading projects in this movement in high school physics and biology. Rudolph describes how the scientists directing these projects drew on their wartime experiences in weapons development and defense consultation to guide their foray into the field of education and he reveals how the broader social and political conditions of the 1950s Cold War America fundamentally shaped the nature of the course materials they eventually produced.