Page 50 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

26 R.A. Martusewicz et al.

has been placed on modern science and technology that many expect that it will be
only a matter of time until science solves all of the worlds’ problems (hunger, poverty,
disease, war, etc.). And yet, we can trace some of the world’s most serious problems
to modern science and technologies. We cannot fully understand the universe; we
are born, live, and die like all living creatures and full control of the complexities
of this situation is not possible. Work in science and thus science education, if it is
to useful, needs to be rooted in local conditions and nested in a variety of systems
of knowledge acknowledged for what they offer life, while understanding that we
will never finally possess full knowledge of the universe.

Notes

We recognize the etymology of “drain” from Middle English as draynen, or from
Old English drēahnian (see, e.g., Merriam Webster online: www.merriam-webster.
com/dictionary/drain). The word in current usage has multiple meanings. On the
one hand, it refers to the movement or flow of water over a landscape or in a water-
shed away from its source. It is also used to mean a device used to move waste away
from where we live or work, as in a sewer pipe. When these two usages are convo-
luted as analogues for one another we see the ways the word “drain” functions
within a mechanistic discourse or mindset. Specifically, when we begin to assume
that a body of water like a stream which is a living system can or should function
as a sewer, we are employing mechanism as a discourse to reduce nature to a
machine. In this sense, mechanism is very detrimental because it fails to acknowl-
edge living relationships in that which it defines as an inert machine.

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