Should Scientists Study History and Geography?

One of the advantages of a national system of education is the kind of public debate that ensues when 'reforms' to the existing system are proposed. The current ministry of education in France has proposed that teaching history and geography in the last two years of the lycees, devoted to preparation for the famous bac which enables students to enter universities, be eliminated for those in the technical/scientific specialization. The protests, led by Alain Finkelkraut, have aroused the usual French passion for abstract debate.

In its simplest form, the question is, do scientists need these subjects for their professional goals, or would they be better off with more science and less history and geography? We have no comparable debate here: first because the curricula are determined locally by professional 'educationalists', and second because we have long ago eliminated geography in our school systems, and basically scant history. The result has been a nation with only the vaguest notion of geography in the broad sense -- that is, not merely where things are located but of the consequences of such locations. As mathematics and music are languages, almost all human activity involves mapping, from the templates of word-processing to the geography of the human mind.

I was wont to give my students at Boston University a blank map of the world. Three out of twenty managed to place France off the coast of Japan. That would not have happened thirty or forty years ago. Similarly, my eighth grade class in Balboa, California, in 1939 used the same European history textbook as is still used, only now at the Junior/Senior level at university: a net loss of seven years.

I don't think scientists need to know history and geography to be better scientists; I believe they need to know both in order to be better people. We need far more knowledge of the past in order to act prudently in the present and for the future; and our lack of knowledge of how geography and mapping work in our minds in relating one element to another is like not knowing how to co-ordinate hand and eye in hitting a ball.