Teaching of General Science

Human beings’ desire to know more about their world has led them from primitive superstition to modern scientific knowledge. From mysticism, doctrine, and the limitations of unsystematic observation based upon personal experience, they have examined the process of thinking itself to develop the method of deductive-inductive thinking, which has become the foundation of scientific method. Although first applied as a method of the physical sciences, the process of scientific inquiry has also become the prevailing method of the behavioral sciences. Science education is not a separate and ‘detachable unit’ of secondary education. Its growth has to be seen in the context of the past historical events. Science teaching in India is several decades old and, of course, it started on a very slow foot. The reviews issued by the Government of India in the year 1887-92 deplorably reflected the sorry and shocking state of affairs in science teaching of that period. The European scientific world in India was limited to field sciences and not to basic sciences that depended on mathematics and laboratory work, Indian fauna and flora attracted the attestation of European naturalists from the Seventeenth century. Indians asked for Western Education in Science from the Government. The Colonial power agreed to create facilities but with miserly financial provision just sufficient to train a few clerks able to operate in English in Government forces and European Commercial houses, and not to enable the native people to pick up treasures from European science. So the hard way of working for science began. Mahendra Lal Sircar (Born in 1833), and M.D. of the Calcutta Medical College, clearly saw that science would never professorships could be filled only by Indians, a clause which further irritated the Government firmly entrenched in the view that only European were suited for such high positions. The author has been teaching general science for last eight years to B.Ed. and B.Sc. students. Students often expressed that there is no such comprehensive book in teacher education, which can satisfy their needs. It was the encouragement of students of different ‘disciplines and research scholars that led me to take up this work and the book “Teaching of General Science” is in your hands as a solution and future guidance in the field of research.