INTRODUCTION: To My Science Education and Notes

[RonPrice]

During 2001/2 a file for ARCHITECTURE, SCIENCE AND HEALTH was opened in my study as part of my independent scholarship as a retired teacher. The material in that file was collected, for the most part, after my retirement from teaching and full-time work in the years 1999 to 2002. I have never had files for these subjects before although, in the 1980s, while writing articles on various Baha'i buildings, I did open a file on architecture(31/8/’03).

 

In 2008 I opened a separate file on science and its many sub-disciplines in the physical and biological sciences. My life story, life narrative, life experience with these disciplines goes back, as far as I can remember, to grade seven when I was twelve and on the puberty cusp. “Egg, larva, pupa and adult,” are the first words I remember from that science course in 1957/8, half a century ago.

 

I continue taking science courses from grade seven to grade thirteen in 1962/3 when I studied chemistry. I took one science course at university in the philosophy of science and one course at teachers’ college on teaching science to primary school children. As I primary school teacher I taught science from 1968 to 1971.

 

Science, of course, is part of everyone’s life in this age, but the formal collection of information and the study of the relevant disciplines did not begin until these early years of the new millennium. My second wife, Chris, took an active interest in scientific subjects and her collection of books and articles is extensive while mine, even now after only half a dozen years of gathering articles, is not large. The social and behavioural sciences and the humanities have kept me busy for decades and that is still the story.

 

It did seem timely, though, to write this introduction after six years of an ingathering of print resources on over a dozen sub-sections of science. I have always liked the view of science held by Douglas Martin, the former director-general of public information for the international Baha'i community, as “the systematic, the disciplined, use of the rational faculty.” In this sense, I like to think that my life has had a scientific turn in this last half century outside its formal study, my teaching of it as a subject and my general interest in its many disciplines.

 

Ron Price

30 October 2008

updated for: SFN

on: 12/11/'09:cool: