Education: The Danger of Importance

Never before has the U.S. scientist been so important to government and industry. But does that mean he never had it so good? Last week at Indiana’s Wabash College, Norbert (Cybernetics) Wiener, professor of mathematics at M.I.T., flatly answered no. Politics aside, said he, the role the scientist now plays can seriously endanger his intellectual health.

Up until World War II, the hard core of American science was to a large extent the individual scholar working alone and voluntarily sharing his work with like-minded people. But then came radar and the atomic bomb and the “need to do something about these quickly. The pace was speeded up, and every available young man was thrown into the effort. As many of these young men were not yet in a position to work freely on their own, and as much of the effort was of a military and secret nature, scientific tasks were divided up by the [scientific] administrators into small pieces, and scientists were employed for very specific purposes.” Result: the individual scientist was not only unaware of the vast, basic problem he was dealing with, but his curiosity about the problem was often discouraged. “The secrecy of military effort merely reinforced a growing policy of secrecy on the part of the commercial firms who regarded the intellectual aspects of scientific progress as secondary to the task of getting ahead of their competitors.”

Atmosphere of Delusion. In addition to this departmentalization “was a growing attitude of worship of the gadget.” The new computing machines worked at such dazzling speeds that they tended to assume more importance than the ideas fed into them. As projects grew and machines multiplied, “the ideal of the great original scientist [gave] way largely to that of the scientific administrator who is more concerned to parcel out his effort and to keep his machines, staff and ideas busy than to develop his concepts.

“In this atmosphere of delusion, there has been so much dead space and dead wood placed between those really capable of ideas that even they are forced to work less effectively than ever before. The scientist is valued in accordance with the amount of money that he spends, and his secrecy often protects him from the inspection which would force upon him the need to spend this money and develop his ideas to good advantage.”

Physicists Without Physics. “The present age of specialization has gone an unbelievable distance. Not only are we developing physicists who know no chemistry, physiologists who know no biology, but we are beginning to get [the physicist] who does not know physics. He proceeds at once to the subtleties of quantum theory without a good fundamental knowledge of classical mechanics or classical optics, even though in these fields many of the very same problems which confront him in the latest specialty already have appeared in a simpler and more perspicacious form.”

As new fields open up, said Wiener, the need for scientists with the broadest possible cultural background increases because the line dividing science and other subjects gradually fades. “For example, we are recruiting into the field of the design of translating machines many young people who are grossly ignorant of the facts of language … So long as we depend for our intellectual development on quickly trained specialists … we shall have to depend for the thoughtfulness and understanding which make society and democracy possible on those who have barely enough intellectual background to carry on their controlled, supervised routine work, and have nothing left to spare for their duties as citizens.”