Prioritizing Science Education

In this Special Issue on education, Science focuses on the connection between learning science in school and the acquisition of language and communication skills, emphasizing the benefits of teaching science and literacy in the same classrooms whenever possible. In the United States, this would be viewed as a radical proposal. Unfortunately, the great majority of Americans are accustomed to science classrooms where students memorize facts about the natural world and, if they are lucky, perform an experiment or two; in language arts classes, students generally read fictional literature and write about it in fossilized formats such as “compare and contrast.”