We live in an age where the image of science has been formed by the fantasy of space exploration, the magic of medical technology, and by the specter of nuclear disaster.

It is a crowded image, as profile overlays profile.  Science is Voyager photographs of the rings of Saturn and electron microscope scannings of the extra-ordinary geometry of the smallest living things.  It is also pesticides which leave fields barren and threaten aquifers; it is holes in the ozone layer, and plumes of radiation released at Chernobyl.  On another plane, it is both the gentle and affecting sensibilities of Einstein and the passionless calculations of Mr. Spock.

Science is, as well, a classroom experience, with field trips, labs, and multiple-choice tests.  It is thick text books with lots of pictures and lots of words…too many of which are technical terms.

Years ago a fine educator, Robert Yager, counted these technical terms.  He examined science texts, K-12, from two different major publishing houses, toting up all the words in bold print with parenthetical guides on how to pronounce them, the words in glossaries at the back of the chapter, and the labels on all the diagrams.  Then he asked…what might these numbers mean?  For an answer, he turned to a discipline that does words for a living: foreign language teachers.  They have set standards for the number of words per year at different grade levels.  In every case, the number of technical terms in the science texts exceeded the foreign language standards…reaching absurd proportions in high school.  Where foreign language study would introduce no more than 3,000 words, the biology texts examined offered 10-13,000.  When we add to this the simple observation that students are likely to already know what a green bean is when they learn “haricot verts,” but are far less likely to already appreciate centromeres, kinetic energy or electron sub-orbitals, etc., it only underlines how out of whack things have become.  Thus, sadly, science is also a prolonged encounter with the absurd.