As is evident from the title of this paper, I believe a knowledge of science and technology already exists in the black community. I also believe that what is necessary at this juncture is the realization that that knowledge exists, and that what must happen to increase black representation in these fields is the systematic cultivation of that knowledge to better enable black people to influence the course of their collective destinies. For me, and for an increasing number of others, science is best defined as a coherent system for creating meaning and beauty--an extension of a people's common sense understanding of the world, and "idiosyncratic to the people whose common sense it is built upon (Nobles, 1978, p. 680)."

Science is old. Contrary to the conventional view, science did not begin with the sixteenth century Copernican revolution or with Thales in sixth century B. C. Greece (Lindberg, 1992). Indeed, science may be said to have begun when humans first began to question their identity (Who and what they were), their location, purpose for being, and destiny. In short, when they first began to exercise curiosity that, I contend, is the chief characteristic of science.

Implicit in this statement is my belief that science is a process-structure. That is, it is a systematic way of looking at the world that grows out of and is embedded in the cultural system of its creators. And, like any other technology--in this case a technology of the intellect--it has acquired a social support apparatus that sees to its care, feeding, and continuance through the creation of training programs beginning in the elementary school and continuing through the college, university and post-doctoral level.

Science, in my view, is not so much SCIENCE as it is ethnoscience. That is, science, as we have come to know it, is less universal than it is the product of a specific time, place and people who sought to make a different kind of sense of the world than the one they then possessed. Accordingly, failure to address the cultural boundedness of science fosters the creation of a rigid, authoritarian revealed wisdom transmitted intergenerationally by the elders of the respective clans more so than the encouragement of curiosity in the novitiates. In this mode, I believe, the goal of SCIENCE is less one of realizing an understanding of the forces and phenomena of the world than it is preservation of the career paths of the stars of the respective science fields necessitating the episodic paradigm shifts described by Thomas Kuhn (1962) in his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Dickson, 1984).

The core of the proposal that follows below, arises from my belief that we can increase the pool of potential black scientists and engineers by changing the way we teach certain aspects of science and technology to our youth. It is further supplemented by what I have learned from my research into the origins and career of the National Institute of Science, a black scientific organization founded in 1943. This organization was established because social segregation, from which science and technology as cultural artefacts are not immune, restricted the level of black participation in southern scientific societies (King, 1994).

For me, definition is the enabling legislation of subsequent treatment. Thus, when (as is the case throughout the popular culture) we define science as something for the exceptional few and simultaneously limit access to opportunities for doing science, it follows that we cannot expect schooling systems constructed in this manner to produce any more than a miniscule number of trained personnel irrespective of need. Further, the extent to which the curricula of our schools (not in and of themselves alone however) impair some minds is a waste of human resources. This is reflected in the adult functionally illiterate statistics and the large numbers of persons unable to secure employment (structural unemployment notwithstanding) because they lack the requisite knowledge, skills, and attitudes to survive in the supposedly free market of the American economy. And, given the increasing importance of scientific and technical knowledge for future survival (Drucker, 1989, pp l73-252; 1993), some form of action designed to enhance technoscience literacy in Afroamerican communities is warranted.

Knowledge, it has been argued, is both an instrument and expression of power. Because many of the problems in these communities derive from the relative powerlessness of their constituencies, while what I am proposing here will not alleviate the general condition, it will, I belief, enhance the life chances for some members of those communities. Without some effort to return hope and incentive to the dispossessed, persons who possess the talent but need the training and discipline that obtains with beneficial formal schooling might otherwise be lost to themselves and to society. My model for this set of linked endeavors is drawn from the activities of NIS,² which chose as its ultimate goal, "a fully integrated American democracy and better living through science approaches."

As areas of special emphasis, they sought enhanced appreciation of scientific values, increased proficiency in science instruction, promotion of scholarly publication, basic research and science education. Additionally, the late Hubert B. Crouch, the organization's first executive secretary, former dean of the graduate school at Tennessee State University, and his several cofounders, expressed concern about the need for more functional relations between academic science, community problems and the resources required to address them. Such a coherent approach, it was believed, might mitigate black under representation in science. At the very least, it was hoped that some progress might be made in upgrading the quality of instruction and the qualifications of the instructors by providing a support system within which these issues could be reconciled.

Accordingly, programs and projects were mounted at the elementary, secondary, and collegiate levels as a means of achieving the common objective of a more appropriate science education for the times. Yet, as I look over the records, the science curricula, the courses of instruction, texts, presented papers, class schedules and related ephemera of science as an academic enterprise, I note little difference between black and white in course goals and objectives: That is, acquiring the values, attitudes, and behavior appropriate to doing science as a highly specialized learned activity.

Indeed, the only real difference I note arises as a function of the financial wherewithal of the institution in which these activities are carried out, reinforcing the fact that opportunity is differentially distributed along race, class, and gender lines in America. The more money that was available for science work, the less dependence there was on independent study for instruction in the advanced subjects. In interviews with elder members of the group who taught in the historically black colleges and universities, I was told that the more hospitable were administrative attitudes, and the more broadly conceptualized a particular institution's vision of education as an evocative process, the more likely there was to be an active research program in the several science departments and encouragement for faculty to secure additional training that they might stay abreast of developments in their respective fields.

Clearly, what this reveals is the fundamentally political character of schooling and how, reinforced by certain belief systems about the abilities of subject peoples, personnel supply can be advanced or retarded to achieve desired realities. As Norman Diamond (1981, p. 38) has written, "How we organize data in science as in every sphere of consciousness embodies an over-all outlook which derives from our social existence. Underlying and structuring all our thoughts is our understanding of our society and our reactions and adaptations to it. Scientific concepts are thus inherently political, continuing to express and reaffirm social based world views."

To better illustrate what I mean here, and also introduce my conceputalization of an Afrocentric³ perspective that will be employed in shaping the balance of this paper, I contend that knowledge is a social product. That is, knowledge, that cannot exist without knowers in a Polanyian sense, is little more than information organized for some specific purpose. We do not discover truth so much as we manufacture it in accordance with our world view, normative assumptions, and frames of reference, and in keeping with the criteria specified by those authorities who taught us how to recognize truth when we saw it (King, 1990, pp 165-80).

To postulate an objective ideal of knowledge that can be possessed or brought in from the outside as if it had an independent existence, which is the essence of a positivist orientation in the scholarly arts, is not only an illusion but also suggests that the scholar is in some way separate and distinct from the forces or phenomena being investigated. This is, of course, patent nonsense (consider as a case in point the current questioning of what is meant by and what is accepted as the canon, the nature of and the meaning of knowledge) and is all too often used to evade responsibility for the consequences of one's actions at the same time that it limits one's perception of himself and the world around him (King, 1995). In brief, ideology shapes consciousness.

Necessarily, then, one of the first questions we must ask of any analysis or interpretation of reality is what is excluded from its universe of definition. Second, we must become sensitive to the moment in the career of any theory, paradigm, concept, system of belief, whatever, when it ceases to be a "scientific truth" and becomes a political ideology shaping our consciousness in a disingenuous manner.

Taking these two together I can recall an early response to my own queries about Blacks in science, a response, I am sure now, affected my own willingness (was this something someone like me could make a living doing?) to struggle with a subject that seemed so remote, so sterile, and so absent of real-world concerns. "If black people had done anything significant in science and technology," I remember being told, "they would have been mentioned in the texts. Since there is no mention of them, it is quite probable they did nothing of significance."

Reflecting on these topics illuminates a second tenent of the Afrocentric perspective as I conceive of it. It is that people are ordinary, experience is not. In the process of revising the syllabus of a course I occasionally teach here at the University, "Science, Technology and Society," I have often wondered if we might not increase black representation in technoscience fields by increasing our emphasis on science as a human endeavor understandable and doable by many more persons than are doing it now.

Suppose, for example, instead of focusing exclusively on the content of science as we teach it, we combine certain aspects of science education with illustrative materials drawn from the history of science. The object here being the creation of surrogate role models having the potential to inspire youth who might not otherwise consider careers in science and engineering because they have no knowledge of others who have gone before them from whom they could get a sense of what is required to follow in their pursuits.

For too long, I believe, the public image of technoscience as some kind of mystery system restricted to an elite few has influenced the selection and training of technoscience personnel. To increase representation from previously underrepresented groups requires a new knowledge base. Central to this knowledge base will be the images of persons--in this case black scientists and inventors--who have succeeded irrespective of the barriers they have had to overcome (Sammons, 1990). It is not that existing images (mostly white, mostly male) do not have merit for understanding how scientists have done their work. Rather, it is that the existing images are too limited, too exclusive and difficult to identify with to sustain my primary contention that anyone--with the appropriate training and discipline of course--can do technoscience. Thus the materials and methods which follow.

In its essence, the aim of this proposal is to communicate the ideas, one, that science is a way of organizing information to produce meaning and beauty; and two, that technology is the application of knowledge to the reconciliation of specific problems thus making science a technology of the intellect with all of the requisite social support systems.

Science does its work by naming, classifying, numbering, measuring, describing, explaining, predicting, and attempting to control the forces and phenomena it surveys. Such a set of activities, Robin Horton (1967, pp 50-71; 155-85) makes clear, irrespective of the culture in which they occur removes these forces and phenomena from the everyday commonsensical universe to a theoretical universe. Further, access to this new universe is limited (in much the same way we initiate neophytes into a fraternity, sorority, sacred clan, club, whatever) by a pledge to abide by the norms of the chosen group and by the acquisition of special values, attitudes, languages, knowledge, and skills through which these forces and phenomena may be deciphered and made known. Because we present knowledge in our curricula (which themselves are political statements about a desired reality) as an objective ideal that is to be acquired distinct from the processes of truth manufacture for some specific purpose, we focus more--at least early on--on the products of science than on its processes. Thus, there is a tendency in present-day science instruction, it seems to me, to lose the sense of wonder that gave birth to the processes of exploration and interpretation initially, inclusive of the roles of judgment and belief that sustain these processes. Science in such a configuration is sterile, and more likely to alienate than entice new recruits to its ranks especially where those configurations do not appear to be relevant to lived experience.

Moreover, this focus on subject matter, and the rise of the division of scientific labor manifest in the creation of disciplines can exhibit a kind of intellectual parochialism transforming its practitioners into little more than information management specialists who pursue research to the exclusion of application, arguing that that is something for others to do not them (there is interdisciplinary cooperation with respect to some projects; there is also, however, the inertia of academic organization struggling to protect its scholarly turf).

Sometimes this parochialism, hell-bent on recruiting new disciples to the one true faith, deflects our attention from the exclusionist tendencies of modern science and the political character of scientific theorizing. That is we proceed in the mistaken belief that by breaking down an object into its component parts and analyzing their characteristics and properties, we can infer the operation of the larger whole when the elements are reunited into composite gestalts and again set in motion.

To counter what I see as the rise of a conscienceless science (Broad & Wade, 1982), what I propose to do in the remainder of this paper is lay out a model of science education where history and the systematic investigation of science as a social institution are integrated with the subject matter of science to reaffirm science and technology as human endeavors (Pacey, 1990). In so doing, it is my hope that by making science and technology less abstract, more reflective of how the world works as I see it, I can make them more relevant to a larger audience.

Turning first to the elementary level, I propose the addition of photographs and short biographies drawn from the lives and work of black scientists and inventors that could be placed around the classroom coincident with the first instruction in science. The focus here is on who did what. For example, a set of lessons (the concrete accomplishments of the person become the subject matter of the lesson) might focus on Charles Turner in entomology, George Washington Carver in chemurgy, Daniel Hale Williams in medicine and surgery, Garrett A. Morgan and Granville T. Woods in technology and Matthew A. Henson in exploration.

The object here is to provide new role models to heighten the interest of young people in science and technology as ways of making sense of the world around them. Simple demonstrations, experiments drawn from the everyday world of the child (NIS had one lesson for teachers showing them how to use an ordinary refrigerator to simulate a cloud chamber that would have been too expensive for most of the institutions from which they came), role playing, field trips, films and other materials might also be employed to begin the construction of scientific attitudes that will be shaped at the intermediate and secondary levels. For one of the things that Lewis A. Gist, for many years an instructor at Virginia State University, made clear to me when I interviewed him, was that science instruction in the historically black colleges--always short of funds, teachers, lab space, and materials--focused on developing a kind of confidence in the students predicated on learning the basic prinicples of the field in which they were doing work. Thus, when they went on to graduate study at wherever, they would be prepared to settle down and take up where they had left off irrespective of the kind of facilities in which they had been trained. The goal here is to incorporate into the child's mind set that science is little more than natural curiosity--disciplined to be sure--but in its essence not at all different from the processes by which priorities are set, opinions formed, and expectations generated about what will happen next.

Moving on to the intermediate level, it is here that we begin to alter our construct of science in keeping with its history and practice. It is also here that we introduce the notion of fashion in science to help dispel the common wisdom that it is a fixed body of facts; that it is hermetically isolated from the outside world and thus objective (whatever is subjectively constructed cannot by definition be objective); and something other than a species of social knowledge whose laws, theories, procedures, et al cannot contradict the fundamental assumptions that guided their creation.

Along with an introduction to the history of science, technology and medicine in ancient civilizations, Egypt, China, Sumer, Greece (Thornwald, 1962), some attention should be paid at this time to describing the kinds of questions scientists and inventors ask. How and from where they originate, how they are shaped and in a sense become the autobiographical expressions of self-knowledge as the genesis of all knowledge, and how those questions are then turned into operational procedures that become experiments to test the questions that have been posed. For example: The astronomical practices of the Dogon, Maya and Aztecs (Hadingham, 1984); the inquiries and activities of Imhotep, the father of medicine, and the work of ancient African peoples in mathematics, irrigation and construction could be included in the curricula (Van Sertima, 1983). Berthel Carmichael in mathematics, Shirley Jackson in physics and Mae Jamison in space exploration are only a few of the many black women who have acquited themselves in scientific activity and who could be used to update the list as the courseware moved into more contemporaneous periods (King, 1987). The goal here is to communicate the idea of science and technology as lived experience--belief, opinion, interpretation, expectation, and conduct. In short, to help potential apprentices learn that science and technology are ways of life that anyone with the requisite preparation can learn and that all civilizations have practiced in accord with their cultures and common-senses.

As we move into the middle and secondary years, continuing even to some extent into the post-secondary years, we will want to put increasing emphasis on the fact that there is nothing universal (indeed, universal is itself a cultural construct) about the kind of science that is currently taught in the schools and in the academy. The only thing universal about science, as this section of the proposal is intended to show, is that all peoples at all times, however, they have chosen to define it, have done science. Moreover, in their travels they have carried those ideas with them or shared them with others who have come to visit them as was the case of the early Greeks who went to finishing school in ancient Egypt in much the same manner nineteenth-century Americans went to Europe to complete their educations.

Since the late middle ages (Lambropoulous, 1993), coincident with the rise of the age of exploration in Europe, western civilization has embraced a Eurocentric conception of science that until very recently was most easily characterized as mechanistic, derivative, intrusive, and imperialist--which is not to say it has not brought beauty and some beneficence to the world. Pushy in the extreme, Euroscience has tended to crowd out other interpretations of science. Its handmaiden, technology--the process of creation--was finally mated with science in the last years of the mechanical era (post civil war America), a time when the priests of materialism sought to consolidate their control over more spheres of life in a bid to expand the scope of their power.

Because of this, what we must begin to show here are the social costs and consequences of doing science as we have done it. More pointedly, I refer here to the creation of scientific racism and sexism (Haller, 1971) that have been employed throughout the last hundred years (Kuper, 1975) to demean and diminish people of color and women that they might be better exploited and kept in their places. Focusing on the history and practice of science in different lands, cultures, and times, can provide a sense of perspective where insight into the structure and uses of science is given equal billing with the subject matter of science. The problem with most human values instruction in the trades is that the latter is emphasized at the expense of the former. We separate the two treating them as if they are not indissolubly linked, allocate disproportionate amounts of time to their coverage, and refigure the whole as a simple technical problem regarding the allocation of resources (knowledge, funding, skill, etc.) whose solution lies in the provision of craft-specific information. Indeed, what we want to have young people in these middle plus years learn is that, in a manner of speaking, science is what -its creators have made it for whatever purpose. As with all things, science is both instrument and expression. As instrument it is a tool designed for concentrating power; as expression it summarizes lessons learned. And, as with all things human, science has limits beyond which, given its current configuration, it cannot go. Knowing the weaknesses of science will help us learn its ways of resisting change. We must also impress upon our children that we can choose the kind of science we wish to practice as we self-sensitize to the politics of the skilled positions in society. We can choose because choice is the means by which we differentially shape the realities we inhabit.

Yes, I am aware of the expectational dilemma here our children face in many of the schools they attend and the erosive character of the curricula they transit. But this is a crucial time in their development, and some way must be found to counter the sense of irresponsibility and ineptitude built into the operational philosophies of our schooling systems. "A mind is a terrible thing to waste," the United Negro College Fund reminds us. Yes, it is. But even more terrible is the wasted spirit of our youth because for some of us they have become inconvenient by their presence among us. We have no place for them because they are different. And, as we all know, difference has a tendency in the proper social setting to become deviance that is punishable. Authority is preserved, change is resisted, underdevelopment proceeds. Here, then, in recapitulating our biographical materials, we must emphasize by examining the barriers--cultural, political, economic, psychological, social--in their lives, how Blacks in science and technology secured the discipline to learn and practice their crafts in spite of the limitations placed on their opportunities to progress and succeed. Throughout the course of these levels, one message I wish to impart given the centrality of work in this culture, is that one can earn a living doing science. The material content of the instructive process as we move into the more advanced levels can be lifted from the several science clans as they exist now, singly or together. The idea is to provide exposure to a range of options and their prerequisites.

Similarly, as I intimated above, this is a time for further grounding in the ethical conduct of science-that is, a science sensitive to the conduct and consequences of its practice. For science without a conscience is barren as the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Jones, 1992) conducted for over forty years out of a false set of premises dictated by nineteenth century racial medicine doctrines that informed the education and training of its sponsors from 1932 to 1972 have made clear. The objective ideal of knowledge is an illusion. Our task then is to become simple not simplistic as we have tended to do with an overemphasis on rationalism as the TRUE path to enlightenment. In being we touch the unity underlying the diversity of creation. We learn that existence is relationship, that cause is effect, that opposites complement, and that harmony prevails. We adopt an ecological ethic at whose center is the notion do not unto others what you would not want done unto you. We cannot conquer nature however much we attempt to explain or justify our conduct in that direction. Clearly, we foul our nest at our own peril.

And finally, it is also here that we begin to introduce our students to science and technology policies where we put forward the idea that we can say what kind of science we want and what it shall be in the public domain (Haberer, 1977).

Implicit in this proposal, and specifically emphasized immediately above, is the belief that we must more effectively learn to think globally as we act locally. The chief liability of rationalism in pursuit of this goal is that it is predicated on a principle of exclusion. In embracing rationalism as fervently as we have, we are not unlike the wandering computer Vyger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Programmed by its creators to learn all that was learnable and return that information to its masters, Vyger could not believe in or prove the existence of what lay beyond the bounds of its instructions. Similarly, we find it difficult to conceptualize beyond the self-imposed/ otherimposed limits of our beliefs. We are, in a word, conceptually incarcerated, prisoners of the very constructs we have created to orient us in an uncertain world.

Not that this proposal will alleviate all these ills. But then my goal is a modest one: to continually remind myself that science is a human endeavor and that it is not without purpose. The problem is what is its purpose?

We are now at a place in the development of our technosciences not unlike that of the sorcerer's apprentice. We have learned how to turn the machines on. We are learning by using them what they can do. We are still struggling to learn how to turn them off.

Science must regain its sense of humor. Without one science makes for too grim and too serious a companion. It is my hope in offering this proposal, focused on reifying the idea that science is a human endeavor with all that that connotes, we can begin that task.

1. A much earlier version of this paper was first given as a talk in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Colorado in 1985.

2.. The founding name of this organization that was created 26 October 1943 at an annual meeting of Conference of Presidents of Negro Land-Grant Colleges in Chicago, was the National Association of Science Teachers in Negro Colleges. The name was changed at its second annual meeting at Livingstone College, Salisbury, N. C. because of pejorative epithets that could be made of the initials of its founding name, and also to reflect the fact that not all of its members were faculty of the historically black colleges. Because of the war, some of these persons had found employment in government agencies and in the corporate sector working on defense projects. For example, there were at least twelve of their number involved in the Manhattan Project.

3.. As it is used here, Afrocentric means to look out from a black center. It is an event-based conceptualization of reality embracing both material and spiritual aspects. As such it argues that the present flows into and creates the past simultaneous with the past creating context for the present thereby influencing actions taken in the here and now. Its worldview, normative assumptions, and frames of reference are derived from the historical experiences and folk wisdom of black people whose ancestral roots trace back to prehistoric Africa, the birthplace of humanity. Less a de novo creation of the modem Black Studies movement than a rediscovery of ancient ways of perceiving the forces and phenomena of the universe, it is here offered as another way of looking at the world. Its primary goal is to provide alternate perspectives out of which more humane social policies might be created, developed, and deployed.

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