JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 30, NO. 8, PP. 819-820 (1993)

Editorial

Rediscovering Gaston Bachelard’s Work

Rediscovering the work of Gaston Bachelard (1 884- 1962), French philosopher of science, might be helpful to persons interested in the nature of science and science education. Only a few of Bachelard’s books have been translated into English so we (non-French speakers) must rely on analyses of his work by persons such as Roch Smith (Gaston Bachelard, 1982) and Mary McAllester Jones (Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist, 199 1) to gain a fuller understand- ing of the range of his work.

My introduction to Bachelard’s ideas on the nature of science was through his 1934 book, The New Scientifc Spirit, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. In the Preface, Goldhammer ex- plains something of the nature and purposes of The New Scientifc Spirit:

It is, among other things, an impressive effort by a literate and learned man to appreciate and communicate what was novel about the “new physics” of his day, that is, relativity and quantum theory; it is also a sharp polemic against an influential tradition in philoso- phizing about science that Bachelard believed to be misguided and indeed pernicious; and it is an impassioned plea to free the teaching of science from fetters imposed by unreflec- tive acceptance of that philosophical tradition (p. xvii).

We see what we look for and I see ideas about the nature of science in The New Scientific Spirit that tend to support my views about the proper relationship between science and philoso- phy. Bachelard sums up this relationship in his statement, “Science in effect creates philosophy” (p. 3). He goes on to explain, “The application of scientific thought seems to me to tend essentially toward reality” (p. 4).

It is not possible in this brief editorial to do much more than point the reader toward sources of ideas on Bachelard’s work about the nature of science and science education. A book by Bachelard not yet translated is the source of many of his ideas on science teaching and learning-La Formation de l’espirit scientifque: Contribution a une psychanalyse de la con- naissance objective ( 1938). The book mentioned earlier, Gaston Bachelard, has captured some of Bachelard’s ideas on science teaching and learning from his La Formation de l‘espirit scientifque (FES). A few of these ideas are found in the following statement by Bachelard (FES, 1938):

for objective science to be fully educational, its teaching should be socially active. It is a great mistake of general education to establish the inflexible, one-way relationship of teacher to pupil. In our opinion, the fundamental principle of apedagogy of the objective attitude is as follows: He who is taught must teach. An education that one receives without transmitting it develops minds without dynamism, without self-criticism (p. 244).

0 1993 by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-4308/93/0808 19-02

820 GOOD

Research in science education should be connected to assumptions about the nature of science as well as the nature of the learner. The possible meanings of research results within a given research program are influenced by the theoretical constructs of the producers and con- sumers of research, including their assumptions about the nature of science. I think Gaston Bachelard’s ideas about the nature of science are worth the consideration of contemporary science education researchers.

RON GOOD Editor