Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring - Musings on the Teaching and Learning of Science

Stephen Jay Gould

Most famous quotations are fabricated; after all, who can concoct a high witticism at a moment of maximal stress in battle or just before death. A military commander will surely mutter a mundane "Oh hell, here they come" rather than the inspirational "Don't one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes." Similarly, we know many great literary lines by a standard misquotation rather than accurate citation. Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam," and Jesus did not proclaim that "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword." Ironically, for this special issue on learning, the most famous of all quotations bungles the line and substitutes "knowledge" for the original. So let us restore our celebratory word to Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian

spring;

There shallow draughts intoxicate the

brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

I have a theory about the persistence of the standard misquote, " a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," a conjecture that I can support through the embarrassment of personal testimony. I think that writers resist a fun and accurate citation because they do not know the meaning of the crucial second line. What the dickens is a "Pierian spring," and how can you explain the quotation if you don't know? So you extract the first line alone from false memory, and "learning" disappears.

To begin this little essay about learning in science, I vowed to find out about the Pierian spring so I could dare to quote this couplet that I have never cited for fear that someone would ask. And the answer turned out to be joyfully accessible -- a two-minute exercise involving one false lead in the encyclopedia (reading two irrelevant articles about artists named Piero), followed by a good turn to the Oxford English Dictionary. Pieria, this venerable source tells us, is "a district in northern Thessaly, the reputed home of the muses." And Pierian therefore becomes "an epithet of the muses; hence allusively in reference to poetry and learning."

So I started musing about learning. Doesn't my little story illustrate a general case: we are afraid because we fear that something we want to learn will be hard and that we will never even figure out how to find out. And then, when we actually try, it's easy -- with such joy in discovery, for there can be no greater delight than finding the definitive solution to a little puzzle. Easy, that is, so long as we have the tools at hand (not everyone has immediate access to the Oxford English Dictionary; more sadly, most people never learned how to use this great compendium or know that it even exists). Learning can be easy because the human mind is an intellectual sponge of astonishing porosity and voracious appetite, that is, if proper education and encouragement keep those spaces open.

A commonplace of our culture, and the complaint of teachers, holds that, of all subjects, science ranks as the most difficult to learn and therefore the scariest and least accessible of all disciplines. Science may be central to our practical lives, but its content remains mysterious to nearly all Americans, who must therefore take its benefits on faith turn on your car or computer and pray that the thing will work) or fear its alien powers and intrusions (will my clone steal my individuality? will greenhouse warning drown my city?). We suspect that public knowledge of science may be extraordinarily shadow, both because few people have any interest or familiarity with the subject (largely through fear or from assumptions of utter incompetence) and because those who profess concern have too superficial an understanding. Therefore, to continue with Pope's topsy-turvy metaphor, Americans shun the deep drink that sobriety requires and maintain dangerously little learning about science.

I write to argue that this common, almost mantralike, belief among educators is entirely wrong and primarily the product of a common error in the sciences of natural history (including human sociology in this case) -- a false taxonomy. I believe that science is wonderfully accessible, that most people show a strong interest, and that levels of general learning stand quite high (within an admittedly anti-intellectual culture overall), but that we have mistakenly failed to include the domains of maximal public learning within the scope of science. (And, like Pope, I do distinguish learning, or visceral understanding by long effort and experience, from mere knowledge, which can be mechanically copied from a book.)

I do not, of course, hold that most people have the highly technical skills that lead to professional competence. But such is the case for any subject or craft, even in the least arcane and mathematical of the humanities. Few Americans can play the violin in a symphony orchestra, but nearly all of us can learn to appreciate tile music in a seriously intellectual way. Few can read ancient Greek or medieval Italian, but all can learn to love a new translation of Homer or Dante. Similarly, few can do the mathematics of particle physics, but all can understand the basic issues behind deep questions about the ultimate nature of things and even learn the difference between a charmed quark and the newly discovered top quark.

For the false taxonomy, we don't restrict adequate knowledge of music to professional players; so why do we limit understanding of science to those who live in laboratories, twirl dials, and publish papers? Taxonomies are theories of knowledge, not objective pigeonholes, hatracks, or stamp albums with places preassigned. A false taxonomy based on a bogus theory of knowledge can lead us badly astray. When Guillaume Rondelet, in his 1555 classic on the taxonomy of fishes, began his list of categories with "flat and compressed fishes," "those that dwell among the rocks," "little fishes" (pisciculi), "genera of lizards," and "fishes that are almost round," he pretty much precluded any deep insight into the truly genealogical basis of historical order.

Millions of Americans love science and have learned the feel of true expertise in a chosen expression. But we do not honor these expressions by categorization within the realm of science, although we certainly should, for they encompass the chief criteria of detailed knowledge about nature and critical thinking based on logic and experience. Consider just a small list, spanning all ages and classes and including a substantial fraction of our population. If all these people understood that they were doing science, democracy would shake hands with the academy, and we might learn to harvest a deep and widespread fascination in the service of more general education. (I thank Philip Morrison, one of America's wisest scientists and humanists, for making this argument to me many years ago, thus putting my thinking on the right track.)

1. Sophisticated knowledge about underwater ecology among tropical fish enthusiasts, mainly blue-collar males and therefore mostly invisible to professional intellectuals who tend to emerge from other social classes.

2. The horticultural experience of millions of members in thousands of garden clubs, mostly tenanted by older middle-class women.

3. The upper-class penchant for birding, safaris, and ecotourism.

4. The intimate knowledge of local natural history among millions of hunters and fishermen.

5. The astronomical learning (and experience in fields from practical lens grinding to theoretical optics) of telescope enthusiasts, with their clubs and journals.

6. The technological intuitions of amateur car mechanics, model builders, and weekend sailors.

7. Even the statistical knowledge of good poker players and racetrack touts. (The human brain seems especially poorly built for reasoning about probability, and no greater impediment to truly scientific thinking exists. But many Americans have learned to understand probability through the ultimate challenge of the pocketbook.)

8. In my favorite and clinching example, the dinosaur lore so lovingly learned -- and not merely known -- by America's children. How I wish that we could quantify the mental might included in all the correct spellings of hideously complex dinosaur names among all the five-year-old children in America. Then we could truly move mountains.

Common belief is ass-backward. We think that science is intrinsically hard, scary, and arcane, and that teachers can only beat the necessary knowledge, by threat and exhortation, into a small minority blessed with inborn propensity. No. Most of us are born with a love of science (which is, after all, only a method for learning the facts and principles of the natural world surrounding us, and how can anyone fad to be stirred by such an intimate subject?). This love has to be beaten out of us if we are to fall by the wayside, perversely led to say that we hate or fear the subject. The love burns brightly throughout the lives of millions, who remain amateurs in the precious, literal sense of the word ("those who love") and who pursue "hobbies" in scientific fields that we falsely refuse to place within the taxonomic compass of the discipline.

And so, finally, the task of nurture and rescue goes to those who represent what I have often called the most noble word in our language, teacher. ("Parent" holds second place to "teacher" on my list; teachers come first because parents, after a certain decision, have no choice.) Rage (and scheme) against the dying of the light of childhood's fascination. And be like English literature's first instructor, the clerk of Oxenford in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales -- the man who opened both ends of his mind and heart, for "gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche."

Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, geology, and the history of science at Harvard University. He is also Frederick P. Rose Honorary Curator in Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History.

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