Science Education and the Scientific Revolution: a way to learn about Science

Abstract

This paper documents some of the international curriculum documents that require

that science students learn about science –its methodology, relations with wider

culture, technology and worldviews– as well as learning the content and process

skills of science. This wider, or cultural, goal for science courses amounts to

students learning something about the history and philosophy of their subject. It is

argued that some study of the Scientific Revolution is a very appropriate and rich

way to forward this cultural goal. The example of the seventeenth-century debate

about the shape of the earth is used to illustrate significant features of the scientific

revolution, and consequently enduring features of modern science.