ABSTRACT
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Duke of Argyll, in his presidential address to the BAAS, stated that ‘what we want in the teaching of the young, is, not so much mere results, as the methods and above all, the history of science’ (Jenkins 1990, p. 274). The Duke’s exhortation has been more ignored than followed, but there has been a minority tradition in science education that has attempted to bring something of the history of science into science instruction. Leo Klopfer, long active on this task in the US, made the following melancholy observation about this tradition:
Proposals for weaving the history and nature of science into the teaching of science in schools and colleges have a history of more than sixty years. Over this long period, various kinds of instructional materials which entwine science and the history of science were produced. The historical accounts, lessons, or units usually served to convey a philosophy of science in which educators believed at the time. Their philosophy of science identified ideas about the nature of science which they wished students to understand or appreciate. These ideas anchored a web, and the strands of science content and science history formed the web’s pattern. Yet each of these webs was fragile; they rarely persisted for very long and left little trace on the science education landscape.
(Klopfer 1992, p. 105)