My (Lack of) Opinion About Pluto--and Its Implications for My Career

Last Friday I posted about Illinois' state legislature passing a resolution to reject the "demotion" of Pluto to the status of 'minor' planet.

This is a subject that I sensed had been on the periphery of the news for three or four years now, and seemed to me that it had been more the punchline of a cute "throw-away" joke of a late-night talk show host than a serious issue, which is why I speculated the Illinois resolution might be tongue-in-cheek. I was surprised--and even happy--in finding that this issue is evidently contentious among some laypeople and science enthusiasts, as I witnessed from the commenter on my last post, Laurel.

As someone who writes science curriculum, I'm delighted to see this kind of discussion, because it's not often I get to see serious headlines discussing some of the daily issues with which I grapple.

That said, in my comment on my last post, I expressed my view that Pluto's status is a "relatively pedantic issue". Let me briefly outline three reasons why I think this is so.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

1. Over the course of the last ten years, astronomers have been continually discovering small, icy, Pluto-like bodies in the realm of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. They've dubbed this region "the Kuiper Belt" (for astronomer Gerard Kuiper), and most interestingly, one of these objects--Eris--is even larger than Pluto itself. A few of these objects are near Pluto-size, however slightly smaller. The parallels to the "Asteroid Belt", or realm of small rocky objects between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, are obvious.

2. The issue is not about whether Pluto will be mentioned in schools. Claims to the contrary are misleading, as no one is questioning Pluto's status as a planet, rather its status as a major planet. The issue is simply that Pluto is obviously not anything exceptional beyond being one of several prominent members of the Kuiper Belt. The issue affects 3rd grade playground chalk drawings and clothing-hanger mobiles like this: M, V, E, M, Asteroid Belt, J, S, U, N, Kuiper Belt.

So why mention Pluto at the expense of other Kuiper Belt objects? I'm all for fairness... why not mention Eris and Sedna too? All of these objects have interesting stories behind their discovery and their inferred characteristics, stories that help bring the "Kuiper Belt" to life. (For the Asteroid Belt, that means mentioning one or two of the larger asteroids, too, like Ceres or Vesta.)

3. There are profoundly important, more obviously non-pedantic issues in science education which are in real, desperate, crucial need of public outcry. One obvious contender is the masquerading of creationism as something other than the religious doctrine it is, and the thoroughly dishonest equivocations of its proponents that evolution is "just a theory".

But I'll give you an even lesser known controversy in science education, and one I think even more deserving of your outcry: the divorce of science education from inductive reasoning, (reasoning that starts with the real world out there)--the method by which we reach scientific truths in the first place. The teaching of the planets makes an excellent case in point. How are we taught about the planets in school? We are given diagrams or lists. From these we make planet mobiles in third grade, and we memorize acronyms like "My Very Educated Mother...". But if we had to define the planets from the bottom up--I mean, according to the realm of our own personal, perceptual experience of the world around us--how many of us know for ourselves that planets appear as star-like dots of light above our heads, which wander against the general motion of background constellations known as the Zodiac? If we are even aware of the fact that the planets are accessible to our own naked eyes, how many of us know that these are only some of the planets, and that the discovery of other planets had to wait for the invention and refinement of the telescope? How many of us have even looked through a telescope and seen for ourselves Saturn's rings, and reflected upon the fact that this extraordinary wonder of our Universe has been routinely passing over our backyard for so many years of our lives?

Few if any people do know or experience these things. That students emerge from their science education with a better knowledge of diagrams and memorization schemes than with actual familiarity and true understanding of the real world around them, is an indictment of modern science education and what I would characterize as the "Platonic" intellectual vanguard which has long dominated the education colleges. (And, of course, we all know that the sad reality is that most students instead give up on science, citing it as "too abstract", "boring", and "too much memorization". Is there any wonder why?)

In my own work, I reject this, and in my career I hope to attempt to turn the longstanding tide to the other direction. I'm part of a small minority that thinks that education in science should respect a person's own actual body of experiences, enlarging upon it in a systematic way, and then building upon that. At this early stage, it's an overstatement to even call this a movement--we're extremely small as yet. But we do exist, and if you're interested in science, I hope you will hear more from our school of thought in the coming decades.