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Sarina Dane's picture

Put a Little Science in Your Life

I read this article directly after reading a Raymond Williams essay called "Marxism and Literature" for my CSEM class. In it, Williams argues that the natural sciences are almost irrelevant because since God (or whoever) made nature, we can never fully understand it, whereas since man created culture, we can truly study and comprehend culture and society. Obviously, I disagree with this notion, considering I am taking a biology class. I do, however, think that looking at sciences like Physics, Bio, and Chem in an applied way, as Greene suggests, is probably the best approach. So much of our day-to-day living is dictating by scientific discoveries from only the last half century that the natural and social sciences are now incredibly connected. It's almost impossible to understand one without knowledge of the other.

If I were to design a high school curriculum, I would love to have most of the classes taught in a combined and interdisciplinary way. Science is related to literature, history, politics, and math. As someone who was never much of a "science person," I think that I would have gotten much more out of my science classes if I were able to directly see their relevance. Part of the problem is that scholars in individual disciplines tend to look at their field of choice as superior to others (perhaps even subconsciously) and don't automatically see how they are interconnected.

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