To the Editor:
Choe's opinion piece (Nov. 10, 1995) asserting that the "Science Distributive Has no Place in Liberal Arts Education," is doubtlessly the best justification I have ever heard for a science requirement. How can that be? Choe asserts that "the sciences do not offer the student anything meaningful about the fundamental human problems," that sciences "are entirely silent on the normative questions regarding human life," that "the sciences merely represent technique and not knowledge," that "modern science has abandoned" the grand humanistic scheme of "classical science," and that "the sciences now train one to become technicians, accountants and machinists." What a grim and devastating verdict, from one of Dartmouth's finest. But go back to sentence three and you will find Choe "confesses that I have not taken a single science course up to now." Precisely the point.
History informs us about the consequences of ignorance. We have seen too many cases in which ignorance becomes opinion, opinion becomes belief, belief becomes dogma and dogma transforms itself into fear, hate and even genocide. If the science requirement does nothing else it trains the student's mind to think critically, to learn the way that at least some of us seek truth about the world, to be clear about the need to distinguish belief from knowledge, to separate a fact from a factoid. The Socratic injunction, know thyself, charted the course for modern science. Hopefully, by the time Choe completes the science requirement for the degree, the meaning of that word "know" will be a little clearer.
