20 April 2007 TIME: 21h45. Canada: Ontario: Ottawa-Carleton Region: Ottawa: 3804 Autumnwood Drive. 45.34411° N 75.64332° W. AIR TEMP: 4° C, clear, calm

In this usually quiet small-house subdivision backing onto rich woods, a clot of teenagers have interrupted their shoving and insulting of each other to mock and heckle me because my headlamp identified me to them as "a scientist." When they asked what I was doing sitting in a van parked in a driveway with this frightening item of equipment, I explained that I was waiting for "another scientist" to pick up some frogs. When Jan Storey pulled up in their car, license-plated "ENZYME," and we started shifting bags of Wood Frogs from my coolers to hers, the kids flocked around for what may have been a useful lesson in freeze-tolerance and adaptation.

For these kids -- even the ones who showed some understanding of enzymes and DNA -- science isn't anything we would recognize. To them it's not "the discipline of creating agreement from ignorance and discord by agreeing to value stories only for their vulnerability to falsification," nor is it the "faith in doubt" that means that "a statement is scientific only if it is refutable by a conceivable event." It's certainly not something they would do, despite all they may be required to learn about it. For them science is something between rote memorization and magic, with truths and dogmas as inflexible as those of the most fundamentalist religion.

On 19 April, Shawn Carlson had sent out a triumphant massage: "SAS is moving! Great news! The citizen scientist universe is about to have a new center... when I will take over as the new Executive Director of the SciTech Hands-On Science Museum. That's right. SAS is combining forces with a major science and technology center in the greater Chicago area to advance citizen science and science education for everyone. This is the next logical step in the evolution of the citizen scientist movement." It's certainly good for SAS to have a home base, but, given what my wife Aleta and I have been through over the past decade, this news sent shivers down my spine.

When I was fired from my post as Research Curator, at the museum Aleta and I had founded to teach and do museum science, the one thing the Board Executive would admit as they asked me to leave was that they didn't get it. We're embedded in a society that doesn't get it, and if we are going to promote "amateur scientist" to a prominence comparable to that of "sports fan" or "television eater," we're going to have to effect a revolution. The great popularizers of the nineteenth century were revolutionary: Darwin published cutting-edge theory as best-selling books, Faraday electrified audiences at his chemical lectures, John Macoun taught botany to everyone he met as he explored Canada, and Thomas Henry Huxley confidently asserted that "To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall." (On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences, 1854).

At this point, a number of idealistic "amateur" scientific ideals were widely held. Scientists were supposed to put their loyalty to their field of study before any loyalty to a political entity. They were supposed to freely exchange data, specimens, & discoveries; were supposed to study whatever would be most productive of understanding, while avoiding situations in which their research might result in personal gain; and were supposed to be unflaggingly sceptical of all aspects of their enterprise (see Gitte Meyer, 2005. Making marketing difficult.) There's nothing new in clashes between ideals of knowledge as a common good and knowledge as the private property of vested interests, but through the 20th century, the ideals of science have been swamped by nationalistic "military research," secret "industrial research," directed funding & "entrepreneurial research," the mystique of professionalism, and the bureaucracy that over-rides some large-scale research enterprises and some museums. This means that a lot of the popular appreciation of science that was gained in the nineteenth century has been lost, and, for a shockingly high proportion of the population, the pictures are again hung turned to the wall (you only have to ask around about the life history of the Eel, Anguilla rostrata, to hear this confirmed).

In 1997 Aleta and I had the opportunity to start a regional natural history museum around specimens from a local University that was abandoning its collections. We thought we'd have a community of support from naturalists, environmentalists, and all the martyrs who had been fired in the commercialization of the nearby national museum. This project grew out of everything we had done previously: the decades of exploratory museum collecting and journalling, the reflection on the philosophy of science, the struggle to save Macoun's National Museum from degradation and commercialism, the recognition of "backroom" museum work as the embodiment of John Holt's "unschooling," our calls for real achievable popular science in our books, and our resolve "to study and publicize those groups of organisms that are widely noticed but not recognized to species, and especially those whose status is rapidly changing."

We had begun thinking about a regional natural history museum in 1974, as we drove Highway 7 through the then-depressed town of Havelock, Ontario, imagining a museum in one of the abandoned automobile garages. All through the years since then, we had hoped for an opportunity to actually participate in such a regional museum. We'd been around a small museum in the 1980s where a founding couple had so dominated the place that it nearly fell apart when they wandered off. We weren't going to wander off, but we tried not to dominate, not realizing that people would be recruited to the board who had never been active in this or any museum and would be told "whatever it was that they were told about us" by members of the executive who apparently found the scope of the project intimidating. After two decades at the National Museum, and the first flush of e-mail collegiality, we hadn't had any experience of having our ideas scorned or glossed over by those with whom we worked – and such conflict was especially unexpected in the institution we'd founded to implement the most important of these ideas.

Our local home schoolers had just triumphed, for example, over the illegal regulations a school board tried to impose on them, and we didn't realize either how dedicated to the classroom model the bulk of the population was, or how fragmented the home-schooling community was. We built unschooling principles into the founding documents of the museum (in particular, that educational activities should contribute to real research), but they were ignored or misunderstood by the certified teachers who took over educational programming. They'd come because they wanted to contribute to a "green" project, but they brought their conventional ideas of instruction, and didn't learn or discuss the deep differences between the museum outlook and their previous classroom practices.

Once the museum was well started, we saw that one mistake had been not first writing a book explaining our vision of a regional natural history museum jointly grounded in what we called the "radical biological egalitarianism" of treating every species equally and in the philosophy of hypothetico-deductive science, and that our other mistake was not realizing how unfamiliar this approach to a small "nature" museum was, and how proactively and vigorously we'd need to defend the philosophical approach within the institution if it was to be understood. Without such a defence our ideas could be divided up (as they were) into "Fred's [comic] idiosyncrasies" and platitudes that didn't need to affect how things were to be done.

Our scientific colleagues from the national museum didn't seem to recognize that we were trying to implement the ideals that had been expressed in the struggle to save their institution from commercialization, and they treated the problems in our failing regional museum as if they were solely the result of personality conflicts. Others, who recognised the reasons for the problems, declined to involve themselves or "take sides." They seemed doubly passive -- as a stereotypist might say -- as both Canadians and naturalists. For the last two years of the museum's existence, this put us in the state that Molly Wolf calls "prophetic dismay: you see an alarming situation unfolding, identify the potential negative fall-out, remonstrate with those responsible; get into huge, unending/ unbending argy-bargies with the opposition; and then, in frustration and angry dismay, watch your prophecy come true."

So, in order to think about avoiding the problems we've been through, let's look at Forrest Mims' characteristic SAS proposals, which he expressed in a talk he gave several years ago at the Maryland Science Center:

"At the end I concluded with a pair of challenges to the effect that: 1) No one should leave a museum or science center without having made a contribution to scientific knowledge. I gave various examples, including measuring and entering into computers things like acorn dimensions, your personal reaction time, solar ultraviolet and extracting from the matrix and measuring fossil mollusks. This was received with enthusiasm by the 50-60 museum and science center attendees. [and] 2) No one should work at a museum or science center who does not make a contribution to scientific knowledge. You could have heard a feather drop." (by e-mail 19 April 2007).

This idea of universal participation is eerily similar to ideas we expressed (see Starting a regional natural history museum) and which got us in the most trouble, so it's going to be especially important in SAS' relationship with the SciTech Hands-On Science Museum that this assumption of serious public participation be properly discussed and interpreted. There's a big difference between the "hands on" teaching of planned results, and the assumption that "common people" can produce scientific progress by actually framing and testing hypotheses of their own. Many potential participants, both as visitors and as Board members, will have been so "class-roomed" that it will take them a long time and a lot of change to realize that they can really be trusted to discover new knowledge on their own, or be recruited to the ranks of those who expect to discover new knowledge.

There is a wide range of levels of involvement practised by various boards. In some institutions, board members are just ornaments, or are recruited to perform their professional work as a volunteer service. This is fine for an institution like a hospital or hockey team with simple, conventionally understood, goals, but it's dangerous if the goals are (or evolve into) ideals that are not widely understood, especially if these look superficially like other goals that are widely practiced. If board members aren't already amateur scientists, can they really support the idea that "no one should leave a museum or science center without having made a contribution to scientific knowledge"? As a recruited new director with new ideas and an external national mandate, Shawn will have a honeymoon period, and he does have the advantage that he's written and published extensively on the subject of amateur science, but he and the Board will have to use these advantages fully to ensure that the Hands-On Museum really understands the SAS dedication to amateur research. In our summary of the lessons we'd learned, we suggest that Board members should be "expected to attend meetings, participate substantially in the work of the museum (especially in low-cost museum functions such as an e-mail list), and attend a substantial fraction of the public programmes," but they'll also have to understand and discuss (if not adhere to) the philosophy the institution promulgates.

I'm not saying that Board of the the Hands-On Museum has any of the characteristics I've worried about above, just that this problem is something that everyone should be wary of...