Towards a Transformative Science Education in Ethiopia-II
Part II- Is Science a Foreign Concept to Ethiopia?
In this blog article, I will argue that the concept of science is not as a foreign as often portrayed and attempt to show where it falls in our existing traditional knowledge system.
I set out by first defining what science is? When we try to define science, the first key problem in introducing science in Ethiopia gets manifested. Science is a foreign word, which can hardly click anything in the mind of a typical Ethiopian. Successful non-western cultures translated the term science into their own language. Japan, China, Russia, Korea, and Israel all have a local name to science. And from Europe itself, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, and many others have done that.
The use of a foreign word for something you dearly hope to get acquainted with is just a bad start. We have to give Mr. Science a local name and help its integration in our family. This definition could be tailored to our philosophy of knowledge, for instance, the counterpart word for science in German, ‘Wissenschaft’, is much broader than the word science in English and encompasses art and religion.
Science is not skillfully grafted into the existing cultural and historical context of Ethiopia. Here, a fundamental question is: how is science different from what Ethiopians are traditionally familiar with and how could it be well embedded into the local context despite potential differences? Essentially, we need to consider it as grafting a tree branch (scion) into a different tree (stock). The success of the grafting depends on how good is the new connection despite the differences between the scion and the stock. So, let’s discuss what science is and how it is different from what we know. Then, we can look into the issue of embedding it into what we already have.
Science is not as foreign as often believed to be to the Ethiopian tradition, in fact to any human tradition. The word science refers to the scientific method and the accumulated knowledge resulting from it. The scientific method is, simply put, a way of knowing the truth or reaching a conclusion using logical reasoning and empirical or observable evidence. In its purest form, you carry out an experiment to see how a particular treatment changes a system. Based on this one could understand the nature of different systems, be it biological, physical, or social. At this juncture, a possibly striking observation is that all the three concepts (logical reasoning, empirical evidence, and experiments) I mentioned here are not new to Ethiopia.
Humanity has always been using reasons, arguments, and pieces of evidence to improve its knowledge. To believe otherwise is to claim that humans started thinking only recently. For instance, before building the magnificent architectural masterpieces of Lalibela in the 12-13th century, Ethiopians had been experimenting for a long time refining their knowledge in the course of numerous trials and errors. The science of carving buildings out of a single rock in Ethiopia dates back to the 5th century. Emperor Lalibela also built 11 churches one after the other and anyone who visited the site could easily see that the most recent Lalibela buildings are more refined. People have always been experimenting in the same way and that is how they developed traditional medicines, musical instruments, traditional dishes, architecture, etc.
The seed of science already exists in Ethiopia. What we fall short of is in systematizing it. The key difference between modern science and the old Ethiopian science is in being systematic. Yes, society has always been experimenting to produce and improve, for example, traditional medicine, traditional dishes, and the plow but the trial and error process behind it took centuries. One key pitfall is, for example, the trial and error process is not done carefully using random samples, or there were not well-organized records for the findings generated in the process.
The new knowledge production process, which is called science in English, improves on the traditional trial and error process. Science has standardized how a valid experiment should be carried out. In general, it has set standards on how to collect data, analyze it, and make logical arguments so that objective understanding could be produced.
Well written Idea. Eloquent !