Recently I took part in the commentary on the “Basic Standards for the Scientific Literacy of Chinese Citizens.” I was invited to write a piece for China Science Daily, and it was published together with interviews of many teachers; see here.
Because of the word limit, I accidentally wrote too much, and when the article was published it was edited and cut. In fact, the cuts were quite well done: the key points were all retained, and the tone was made less aggressive. Still, I’ll post the unedited original here for reference~
The newly released “Basic Standards for the Scientific Literacy of Chinese Citizens” has stirred up a great deal of controversy. Apart from watching the spectacle and picking at flaws, some scientists and scholars in fields related to history of science and sociology of science have gradually begun to join the discussion in earnest, and some scholars have even pointed out that the release of this “Basic Standards” also has many positive implications.
Of course, there are positive implications. In any case, the controversy itself helps increase attention and stimulate discussion. As the saying goes, a blessing in disguise; but speaking concretely, one cannot use the benefit gained after a lost horse to excuse the cause of the lost horse itself (such as negligence or theft). As far as the release of the standards itself is concerned, I think it is always a bad thing. A lucky miscue is luck, but more important is still to reflect on and examine why the shot went astray in the first place.
The implementation of this “Basic Standards” itself has the character of “the result obscures the process.” Some scholars saw that related work on assessments of civic literacy has been well practiced in developed countries such as the United States, and thus believed that China’s issuance of such standards is also a good thing of “aligning with international practice.” Yet in terms of the design and implementation process of standards, our approach is completely different. In the West, such assessment standards are often designed by academic circles or private institutions, serving as references for surveys and research into citizens’ scientific literacy. In China, this assessment standard itself has also become a study material, released top-down by the authorities, requiring departments at every level to organize study sessions.
When the body is healthy, one naturally looks radiant; judging the complexion is an external standard for assessing whether the body is healthy. If we only care whether one has reached the result of a rosy complexion, and do not care about the process of how one exercises the body—for example, by relying on punching oneself in the face to look rosy—one might indeed fool the evaluator, but that is obviously putting the cart before the horse.
It is quite obvious that the cultivation of citizens’ scientific literacy should rely on more完善 primary and secondary education, as well as the nurturing influence of the overall social and cultural environment, rather than on studying the assessment standards themselves.
Chinese people are good at training themselves for exams, but do not value the cultivation of genuine quality; students with high scores on English exams may be unable to converse fluently with foreigners, and students with high scores on political exams may not believe in communism at all. Of course, given considerations of fairness in selection, within a certain scope it is an unavoidable thing to emphasize “exam skills” and to judge heroes solely by scores. However, the matter of citizens’ scientific literacy does not need to be pushed forward in this way at all.
Such a mode of implementation not only brings no benefit, but may instead cause new harms. The “melamine” incident, for example, is a typical case. Adding melamine to milk powder brings no benefit whatsoever; its only function is to pass protein-content assessments. If protein were not being tested, the problem with milk would at most be a little extra water mixed in—harmful, but not greatly so—whereas the implementation of protein testing could instead lead to worse results.
So when we say that implementing related assessment standards in the United States is a good thing, that does not mean that introducing this standard in China is also a good thing. If what this standard incentivizes is not richer enlightenment education and more open science communication, but rather prompting every unit to parrot and cope, thereby opening up space for people to use melamine to pass as protein, then the effects it produces may well be even worse.
So let us take a look at what kinds of “melamine” the implementation of the “Basic Standards” may bring about—in other words, what harmful ideas may slip in under the cover of the “Basic Standards”?
First, the “Basic Standards”’ understanding of the concept of “science” is very vague. In many cases, “science” is basically equated with “correct,” even “good,” and “scientific knowledge” is equated with “correct knowledge.” This too is a manifestation of “the result obscures the process”: science includes not only the scientific knowledge that has settled down, but also the complex and diverse activities of seeking knowledge.
Although the “Basic Standards” nominally acknowledges that science “is constantly developing” (Article 3), what it means by this is only that “scientific knowledge itself needs continuous deepening and expansion,” and it never speaks of the fact that science can also make mistakes, or that the development of science involves correction and innovation in addition to deepening and expansion. We certainly cannot expect to take Popper’s falsificationism or Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions as the standard for public understanding, but at the very least, shouldn’t we include the characteristics of the scientific tradition since ancient Greece in terms of freedom and criticism?
The “Basic Standards” mentions “the scientific spirit of seeking truth, questioning, and empirical verification” only in Article 10, but from the rest of the content, the questioning spirit the editors have in mind is basically directed at things outside science. For example, in Article 32, immediately after the empty slogan “practice is the sole criterion for testing truth” comes “experiment is an important means of testing whether science is true or false,” which is a serious misunderstanding—indeed, experiments are in fact a key link in modern science, but their significance is obviously not to test whether “science” is true or false. A scientist proposes a hypothesis, and if an experiment confirms it, then of course everyone is happy; but if an experiment falsifies that hypothesis (and leaving aside the fact that so-called falsification is actually very complicated), then one can only say that the “hypothesis” has been falsified, not that “science” is false. Some hypotheses proposed by Einstein were ultimately disconfirmed by experiments, but Einstein remained a scientist; a charlatan may make a prophecy that happens to be confirmed by experiment, but that does not mean his theory is not pseudoscience. Experiment is an important tool of scientific research, but it is not a means of testing science itself.
This kind of attitude that understands “science” as a ready-made correct conclusion is everywhere in the entire “Basic Standards.” Another example is Article 33, which says that “explaining natural phenomena must rely on scientific theory… for natural phenomena that cannot yet be explained by scientific theory, one should not be superstitious or follow blindly.” This sentence sounds roughly correct, but it seems to require people to know in advance which phenomena have been explained by science and which have not. A charlatan may also provide explanations in the name of science, and erroneous explanations may also appear in some seemingly authoritative texts (for example, this “Basic Standards”’ explanation of sunlight). Many people are willing to believe in science, but in practice they may simply be following a charlatan blindly. So what should we do? Actually, it is very simple: saying “do not be superstitious, do not follow blindly” is enough; even explanations given in the name of science should not be accepted superstitiously or followed blindly.
Conflating “science” with “correct” is one of the “melamine” ingredients implicit in this “Basic Standards.” First, it allows people to “cut corners,” directly attaching themselves to ready-made scientific conclusions and bypassing the process of free thought and critical questioning. Second, it easily mixes together different kinds of “correctness” from different contexts. For example, we can say that melamine is a “good thing”; it is very useful in plastics and coatings, and then we may say we can add a little “good thing” to milk powder, such as vitamins or amino acids. But if we tear it away from its own context and treat one good thing as another and mix it into milk powder, the result may be catastrophic.
As for the traditional Chinese ideas such as yin-yang and the Five Phases mentioned in this “Basic Standards,” as well as philosophical concepts like dialectics and systems theory, the situation is similar. Some scholars point out that traditional ideas such as yin-yang and the Five Phases do indeed have value and are certainly worth modern people’s understanding, and that is not wrong. But the key question is: what role are they being assigned, and in what manner are they being introduced into the “Basic Standards”? This question is more important than whether they themselves are “good things.”
Some scholars think that “yin-yang and the Five Phases have value, so mixing them into the ‘Basic Standards’ is a good thing,” but they ignore or do not care that the value these ideas hold in their own minds and the value of their introduction into the “Basic Standards” are two entirely different things. When the result obscures the process, perhaps they have already been poisoned by the “Basic Standards” and its evaluative logic.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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