The following is a copy of the speech given by Delaine Eastin at Explorit Science Center’s expansion kickoff ceremony on Thursday, October 14, 2004. Delaine is a professor at Mills College and the former Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of California.

I love this place, I live in Davis myself. But I especially love this science center, because I think it really is at the core of what we need to do in the state of California to really lift up the education of all of our children. Let me just say that there are people in this state who have been absolutely opposed to hands-on-science. They think the best way to teach science is to put kids in rows and lecture to them, to have the memorize sets of facts. But the truth is, when you live in a knowledge economy, where information doubles every two years, you cannot memorize everything. What you have to do is learn discovery, learn experimentation, learn, in fact, a whole new set of skills for this future of ours.

In the last couple of years I’ve had two opportunities to go to George Washington’s river farm on the Potomac. It’s not Mount Vernon, it’s the river farm. Anyone been there? It’s a wonderful place, and if you tour that site, now owned by the American Horticultural Society, you will find specimen trees planted from seeds that Lewis and Clark brought back from their expedition. The idea came from the founders of this country, who were indeed an amazing group of people. Now, indeed, if they had failed in founding America, they wouldn’t have just been unelected, they would have been put to death by the British government. These were brave, bold people.

And so many of them spoke about the importance, the sacred importance, of education for future generations. Jefferson wrote:

“Every government degenerates when trusted to the leaders of the people alone. The people themselves are the only safe depositories. To render them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. An amendment to our Constitution must come in aid of public education.”

Adams wrote:

“Laws for the liberal education of youth are so extremely wise and useful, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for that purpose should be thought too extravagant.”

And yet, it is imperative that individuals like the people assembled here and the many others who have supported Explorit have this symbol, this real center for learning. Because in fact, we are dragging our feet so badly in other areas.

One of the people being honored [at a luncheon I attended yesterday] was MRC Greenwood. MRC has strong ties here in Davis. She is now the first female provost of the entire University of California system. MRC is also a scientist, and she as much as any single person, has worked with me to fight the forces of regression in science. There was a movement afoot to say that the California frameworks would not be allowed, that teachers should not spend more than 20 to 25% of any classroom lesson on experimentation. And further, that they should tell them the expected outcome of the experiment before it happened! MRC got all ten chancellors of our great University of California, as well as several corporate CEOs, to write letters to say how silly that was.

But in fact, Explorit’s place is so much more important, because even though we were able to fight back that effort, the situation in public education is that there is a lack of support for good science. And I see this Center as not just being wonderful for the kids in Davis – wonderful for the kids of Yolo County – it can be one of the most important science centers in California and in America, for showing how we can give children powerful science understanding.

You know I was ten years old when Sputnik went up in 1957. They say a lot of your values are established by where you were when you were ten years old. The fact is America was given an ice cold shower when Sputnik went up. It was so alarming, so frightening, that we started a huge effort to get more of our students to attend the great universities to study math and science, and yes, to become teachers. We called that college student loan program the National Defense Education Act, and yet if we really believe in the defense of this country, we ought to be sad to know that the number of Ph.Ds granted by our great University of California is going down dramatically. We gave fewer Ph.Ds in science and math last year than the state of Massachusetts, which has one-sixth the number of students than we do. The fact is that we have stepped away, in a powerful way, from the kind of education that Explorit will be providing. And it is really an enormous need that we must fill in this area.

There’s a wonderful book out called Teaching the New Basic Skills, that talks about the skills we need in the new economy. The fact is that some of our students who have powerful educations in science may not become scientists and mathematicians. We may have to suffer though a few Bachs and other great musicians and great artists. The fact is that the link between learning on the left and the right sides of the brain, between science and music and the arts, is very clearly established. Most of the great prizewinners in science also have a background in music. What we are talking about is filling a very important need that our students have that is not being met by typical classrooms. Davis is exemplary, but the truth is they’re not getting a lot of help from the state of California.

But what are the new basic skills? According to the chairman of Motorola, he says

“Memorized facts, which are the basis for most testing in schools today, are of little use in an age when information is doubling every few years. Our workforce needs to utilize facts to assist in developing solutions to problems.”

The fact is, the new basic skills are what front line workers need. They need the ability to

• Work in groups, which is what you do when you experiment at the Explorit Science Center.

• Learn to measure progress regularly, which is one of the things we do in science.

• Persevere, learn from mistakes, and identify defects.

It isn’t bad if we have a hypothesis, and the experiment doesn’t come out the way we thought it would, that’s part of learning! And the way we use this whole approach at Explorit Science Center is critical to education. This is what Murnane and Levy say in their new book Teaching the New Basic Skills:

“Psychologists have shown that children learn science most effectively through hands-on, minds-on methods. At best, hands-on science means children working together in groups to formulate hypotheses, to design and carry out experiments, to collect and analyze data, and to communicate results in an interesting way. When children discover these principles, the principles that explain the data they have collected, they tend to remember the principles.”

This isn’t rocket science for most of us out here, but it is, I’m sad to say, for too many policymakers in Sacramento. I believe that more than ever before our schools face extraordinary challenges – lack of financial support, low expectations for our students. I proposed that we require two lab sciences in high school, and I practically got laughed out of the state capital! It’s a duh! Of course we should require two laboratory sciences! Other states are doing it, and other high performing countries around the world are doing it. We have limited faculty capacity in science – even some of the finest teachers do not have a strong grounding in science. That makes Explorit’s role even more important.

We are too much emphasizing multiple choice exams, and in so doing emphasizing the ability to noodle through a set of numbers and a set of facts, and to pick the right one. Anyone here have a multiple choice life? The only time I have a multiple choice life, it seems to me, is when I’m at a restaurant, when I look at the menu. That’s about as close as I get. But for several reasons, the state of California has become all together too dependent on multiple choice exams, as has the rest of the country, and that’s why I think Explorit can lead the country.

This book is one of my favorite reads in the past two or three years. I don’t know if any of you have ever read Jefferson’s Children, by Leon Botstein. He was the youngest college president in the country, and he writes this, which I think is so critically important. I think in some ways the failure to provide powerful science education in elementary, middle and high schools may be the sin of our time. It is one of the ways we keep kids interested in coming to school every day, and one of our greatest challenges is an extraordinarily high dropout rate, which I think comes in part from boring these kids half to death. This is what Botstein writes:

“The weakest part of America’s educational system is located at the juncture between adolescence and schooling. For all income classes, races, and regions, the junior and senior high school years, from ages twelve and thirteen to ages seventeen and eighteen, mark a time of trouble, adolescents rapidly lose interest in learning and become hopelessly distracted.”

I have been to this Explorit Science Center. I have seen the kids. They are anything but distracted. They are engaged. They are involved. They are excited. They are practically falling all over each other to stay in these experiments. Botstein adds:

“American educators have become used to underestimating what children can learn. Both they and the public have repeatedly confused the speed of learning with the ability to learn. We judge our schools by tests which judge the speed of recall and not the quality of thought. Thinking carefully about a question is more important than identifying the right answer.”

That’s why Explorit is important. It gives kids a chance to think about the questions, a chance to explore, a chance to continue in a place of wonder. You know I hardly ever go to a school ever where the kindergartners, the first and second graders, aren’t in love. But middle school I find too many kids, high school I find too many kids, who have checked out, turned off and may well drop out.

I think Explorit could be the single most important thing that this community and this region can do to help engage and involve our kids.

I think we are in a situation that should be as scary to us as Sputnik. I think the new economy’s demands for a highly skilled, highly educated workforce, make it a sin not to give kids a great science education. And along the way, even if they don’t become scientists, they’ll be better gardeners and better community members, they’ll be better parents and better neighbors, and they’ll be much more certain that we cared enough about them. I will say that at a time when colleges and universities become more difficult to enter, even as science becomes more important, we need to support this center and we need to make sure it’s a success, that it reaches out across this great region of the Central Valley.

I want to close with one thought. Neil Postman said, “Children are messages we send to a time we will never see.” I was sent into this world by some people who aren’t here anymore. I was sent to this great state, this great community by some very thoughtful, visionary people. In my case it was a machinist and his wife, for heaven’s sakes.

But they dreamed great dreams for the kids of California. It’s our generation’s responsibility, and the next generation’s responsibility, to dream even bigger dreams for kids. I am so tired and weary of the short-sighted, parsimonious, negative, narrow views held by so many policy makers. There are certainly too many people who haven’t been willing to go to the mat and fight for kids. People here today are doing that, and I’m very proud of all of you. You are my heroes and [Explorit co-founder] Anne [Hance] leads the list.