Abstract
This chapter highlights the contributions of Joseph J. Schwab to the field of science education through a discussion of some of his most important published work. Schwab began his career on the faculty of the undergraduate college at the University of Chicago in the 1930s at a time when the college was engaged in a radical experiment in general education. Schwab believed that the undergraduate experience should develop an appreciation in students for the modes of thought used in scientific investigation through critical reading of original scientific papers and Socratic discourse with the goal of preparing them for a lifetime of learning and informed decision making. He later brought the lessons learned at Chicago to the 1960s era reform of school science.
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Notes
- 1.
Schwab preferred “enquiry” to “inquiry,” but in his writing the spelling varies depending on where the work was published. In this chapter, the spelling that actually appeared in a publication will be used, and all my discussions of his work will use the word inquiry.
- 2.
The terms general education and liberal education will be used synonymously in this chapter to describe nonspecialized and nonvocational programs of study that offer students a broad base of experience with various modes of thought and knowledge of their culture.
- 3.
See The Emergence of the American University by Lawrence Veysey (1981) for an extended discussion of the history of the American University during the time period in question.
- 4.
A comparison between Schwab’s and Kuhn’s ideas, especially the implications of those ideas for science teaching, can be found in Kuhn and Schwab on Science Texts and the Goals of Science Education (Siegel 1978).
- 5.
A number of undergraduate colleges in the United States continue to require a common liberal arts core, although the grand experiments of the first half of the twentieth century at places like Chicago for the most part no longer exist.
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DeBoer, G.E. (2014). Joseph J. Schwab: His Work and His Legacy. In: Matthews, M. (eds) International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7654-8_76
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