Research Scholars and Curriculum Development

Extract

Your Executive Secretary has asked me to discuss a particular aspect of our recent efforts involving the schools. The question, specifically, is why are scientists willing to spend large parts of their short lives outside their lovely ivory towers, trying to help the schools to help themselves. Surely it might be, but is not, only an excess of missionary zeal. Nor is it that science itself is getting too difficult or too precious, though sometimes we have our moments of depression, when we believe that science is moving away from the concerns of people. Of course, it is not. No, in our ivory towers it is still true that a molecule may not talk but it never talks back; moreover, its feelings are never hurt, and it never does one thing because you ask it to do another. Ask a molecule a sensible question, and you will get a sensible answer.