New trends in physics teaching, v.4; The ... - unesdoc - Unesco

New Trends in Physics Teaching IV
TEACHING APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY
There are two risks that accompany the teaching of science at school. The first risk is that pupils
wil be so captivated by the fascination and challenge of the subject that they regard pursuit of
the scientific discipline as an end in itself and will in future not care to what their work is applied.
This has been the case with the majority of science and technology entrants to universities in the
past, and is an important contribution to the fact that at present 40 per cent of all the world’s
scientists and engineers, are working directly or indirectly on weapons of destruction 161. The
second risk is that as a reaction to the first, other pupils wil reject all technology as being
irrelevant to the real needs of humanity.
I have written elsewhere on how Appropriate Technology can be introduced at degree level
[ 71 but that is starting too late. It is only by introducing its concepts as part of the background
of school science teaching that the above risks can be avoided.
It would be most inappropriate of me to attempt to give a detailed plan of how you should
bring Appropriate Technology into your teaching. The circumstances of readers wil vary so
much in so many ways - the local climate, the degree of development, the money and equipment
available, the presence or absence of local industries or farming - these and other factors
must influence the approach used. It is possible however, to lay down the following guiding
principles that should form assumptions underlying all the teaching.
1. Technology should be appropriate. Scientists and engineers should be primarily concerned
with the social objectives, and they should acquire and use technical skills in order to achieve
them.
2. In judging appropriateness, or fitness for purpose, factors other than technical ones must
be taken into account. Such factors may be geographic (very limited water supplies), economic
(the need to save foreign currency by limiting imports of steel), ecological (clearing the hedges
will destroy the habitat of beneficial wild life), political (the region has aspirations of economic
independence), or social (the land is owned by absentee landlords). These examples could be
multiplied endlessly, and furthermore they often interact.
3. We cannot escape the link between judging appropriateness and the need to make moral
judgements. For example the introduction of capital-intensive equipment into a community
where everyone is self-employed can result in a complete change in the social structure, with
most people becoming employees.
4. The solution to a problem may not be technological. Some of the most dramatic increases
in food production have been obtained by changes to the local social system to ensure that the
people growing the food obtained personal benefit from increasing their output. This succeeded
where the introduction of new grain varieties had failed.
5. High or new technology may not be appropriate. For example, where there is a surplus
of labour, a simple technology that uses it more effectively is more likely to be appropriate than
one which replaces labour by machines.
6. The user of a piece of equipment or a technique must be taken into account. Intermediate
Technology equipment for growing food in one region failed to be socially acceptable because all
the food growing there was done by women, but only the men were consulted.
Given that school teachers make assumptions such as the above, they wil influence the atmosphere
in which their pupils work and mature. These assumptions wil influence the way subjects
are presented regardless of what appears in the syllabus. Examination questions can be made
more relevant to the local situation.
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