Page 40 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

16 R.A. Martusewicz et al.

with natural systems are swept aside, defined as “primitive” or “undeveloped,” in
favor of the “technological efficiency” of industrial methods. Monoculturalization
and market-based relationships are replacing what were once rich relationships
nurturing community along with biological and cultural diversity (Shiva 1993). We
live in a culture that presents these problems as inevitable consequences of human
“progress.” As C. A. Bowers (1999) points out, such a mindset is the result of
deeply embedded and discursively reproduced ideological forms that represent
modern industrial processes as the most “evolved” even while they are killing us:
“A form of cultural intelligence that ignores how toxins introduced into the environment
disrupt the reproductive patterns of different forms of life jeopardizes its immediate
members as well as future generations” (p. 169). This is a system of short-term
achievements that values, even argues for, individual profit over life. We are
currently reeling from the myth that an “unfettered market” is the shortest route
to “freedom.”
Of course, this definition of “freedom” is undergirded by the powerful assump-
tion that humans are unavoidably self-interested, that the “individual” is the most
basic unit of the human species (which is superior to all other species), and that the
most successful societies will be those organized to effectively capture that indi-
vidualist drive and make it productive. Indeed, that idea organizes the entire notion
of equality of opportunity, and the myth of meritocracy as the basis of public
schooling as well as the idea that the primary purpose of public schooling should
be to prepare our children to compete in the workforce and to “make our economy
the most powerful in the world.” Reports beginning in the early 1980s such as A
Nation at Risk claimed that the USA was falling behind our economic competitors
worldwide, and it was primarily the fault of inferior math and science education.
Since then, a standards-based accountability movement valorizing math and science
as the most important domains of knowledge has dominated public school politics.
This is no accident as these knowledge areas are defined as the most important for
industrial development.
Our culture is so steeped in metaphors that valorize competition, “progress,” and
“unlimited growth” as the way to satisfy individual profit motive as a core human
trait, that we accept as inevitable the attending exploitation of human and nonhuman
life to get what we are told we “need.” “Hey, that’s Progress!” The drive to consume
our forests and fisheries, to put McMansions all over once fertile farmland, and
impoverish our rural and urban communities as we manufacture more and more
“stuff” in outsourced international labor markets in the process is “just the way it is.”
We look the other way as animal torture is practiced in the name of science, justified
in layers of anthropocentric “progress.” The same can be said for perversions of eth-
ics in medicinal research in which drugs are used experimentally on patients who
exercise a so-called free will but, because of their economic positions in relation to
an industrial military complex, in reality have no choice.
These damaging economic practices are put in place and rationalized via deep
cultural meanings that are internalized and passed down over many generations, so
that we don’t even notice the ways they operate in our daily conversations. While
they may be shifted as they are exchanged and applied over time, in general, they