Once the student acquires a basic and broad acquaintance with a field through an introductory course, there should be available to him science courses in General Education proper which assume and draw on his knowledge. These courses should take up explicitly three issues usually ignored in the departmental courses: first, the methods of sciences, analyzed and compared on the basis of a grasp of at least one method of one science; second, the grounds of scientific generalizations and theories, extending first-hand experience with theoretical calculations from introductory laboratories; third, the social context of science, starting from knowledge of at least one scientist in one real laboratory in one real department. It is these courses that would perform the "orienting" function of scientific education with Holton emphasizes. In order to make the introductory courses now called Nat Scis available through the departments, and in order to leave the field of Gen Ed open to topical courses which treat these three issues, the departmental courses currently disguised as Nat Sci should shed their false labels.

(At present, there are probably only two courses which qualify as this kind of science Gen Ed: Nash's Nat Sci 4, which presumes a high school background in science, and Holton's Nat Sci 120 (not given this year), which presumes Physics 12.)

Such Nat Sci courses, if they required a college-level introduction to a science, or the equivalent as shown by test, would offer more incentives to teachers than a lower level course attempting to treat the same three issues: an instructor could use language to which he was more accustomed; he would not constantly stumble over lack of elementary information; and he could expect spontaneous interest from the student who elected the course.

There would have to be many more such Nat Sci courses than there are now. Departments could encourage professors to take the time to teach them either by rotating them among the members of the department year by year, or by allowing individuals to give courses periodically instead of each year.

The Doty Committee might consider requiring, in addition to one introductory science course, mathematical proficiency equivalent to that provided by, say, Math. 1. The Redbook and Holton emphasized how useful, and often how essential, mathematics is for a direct approach to scientific problems; scientific literacy without the concepts of function, rate of change, and limit, and what these mean in operation, is subtile indeed.

Gen Ed for Scientists

The Redbook rightly noted that "a general education in science needs to be provided for the future scientist or technologist as well as for the general student." Thus there should also exist science Gen Ed courses which exploit the greater scientific sophistication of the concentrator in examing the three central issues of science Gen Ed.

But scientists need an additional kind of course which belongs in a Gen Ed program: surveys of problems and procedures in scientific fields other than their own. Because a Harvard degree includes just sixteen courses, the scientist cannot take introductory courses in all the fields that look interesting. The creation of concentration in Biochemical Sciences, and in Physics and Chemistry, offers pragmatic evidence of scientists' need to know more than what the departments circumscribe. A elementary biologist with Math. 1 at hand, for example, might want to look at elementary thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to see what they offer by way of models of ecosystems. Such courses could perform some of the three Gen Ed issues as well: A course for physicists might teach evolutionary and genetic theories and compare the strength of predictions and kinds of concepts used in biological theory with those in physics. A course for mathematicians in the psychology of how humans handle symbols might study the influence of notation and the availability of libraries on the discovery of theorems. Obviously, these courses would be very experimental in content and procedure.

Finally, these recommendations would leave lower-level science Gen Ed courses, i.e., those without scientific prerequisites, open to the unclassifiable experiments in elementary scientific education which departments will not support. Such lower-level courses belong under the guidance of the same organization that should be chosen to direct the freshman seminars, the Committee on General Education. The handsome financial support which is available for Gen Ed courses should attract faculty with ideas to try, and the enthusiasm and originality of the faculty should attract students with minds to try.