Viewpoint

Ethnoscience, Science Education And Ideology

Humans organise the world into conceptually meaningful units to both describe and explain the phenomena making up perceived reality. Peoples do so by applying paradigms arising from their world view. They devise taxonomies and explanatory models which function as world descriptors, giving meaning to observed phenomena. Such a taxonomic or explanatory complex is referred to as an ethnoscience.

Unlike scientific models, ethnoscientific models are valid only within a specific cultural frame of reference. They are meaningless when considered in isolation from their underlying world view constructs.

New Guinean taxonomies, for example, are frequently bewildering and simply don't make sense until one delves into the cultural frames of reference. It is not that ethnotaxonomies are "wrong" because they do not agree with scientific ones. They are perfectly right given their own paradigms. Being a cultural adaptation to the real world, however, means that ethnoscientific models are not valid when transposed to other world settings.

The relationship between ethnoscientific conceptual understanding and the learning of science in Papua New Guinea has been the subject of considerable research by this writer and others. Papua New Guinean students tend to hold science in very high regard, but the subject often presents major conceptual problems for them. It is clear that a contributing factor is their tendency to apply ethnoscientific paradigms to scientific situations.

Present trends in New Zealand involving the incorporation of Maori ethnoscience into science education do not strike me as being based on very scholarly considerations of either science, ethnoscience, or indeed educational psychology. When people start commenting that science is merely a cultural viewpoint or that the conceptual frameworks underlying ethnoscience and science are the same, one can only wonder to what extent they are qualified to comment on either.

Not, of course, that the present moves are anything but the forcing of a particular ideology on New Zealand children -- an ideology called "biculturalism". The draft copy of the new secondary science syllabus in my possession does not read like a science education prescription. Rather, it is an ideological-political statement --some of it written in a minority tongue few New Zealanders speak -- about social engineering. It supports forcing a minority ethnic viewpoint on the population as a whole in the guise of science. This is a trick the ideologically hegemonistic "bicultural" zealots possibly learned from the American creationist lobby.

As for the reported acceptance of such a statement by teachers [GIGO, September 1990], one can only recall the Race Relations Office's 1985 booklet Taha Maori with its ominous proselytising about the need to coax and even cajole teachers to kowtow to this quasi-religious Greater Cause, and wonder silently whether there is a connection.

There may well be a place for ethnoscience (including, but not exclusively, Maori) in New Zealand education. I for one believe that studying various cultural world views broadens the mind and promotes tolerance. This is highly desireable in a multicultural society like New Zealand. But to promote a mishmash of science and one culturally specific ethnoscience does justice to neither and is deleterious to an understanding of both.

Above all, we need to develop a climate of intellectual openness and honesty towards these complex issues, not the fashionable white-bashing, trendy name-calling, pseudo-intellectualising and culturally imperialistic one in which much of this "discussion" is taking place.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek is a lecturer in Science Education at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek is a science education lecturer at PNG University