Bill “the Science Guy” Nye said this somewhere across the forty years of public work he has been performing, and the standard absorption tends to receive it as a piece of generic science-advocacy boilerplate, the kind of line that gets quoted at high school graduations and on the various platforms calibrated to producing engagement around STEM education. The line gets attached to images of children holding test tubes, to organizations applying for grant money, to the various campaigns that have been quietly using the man as a piece of cultural product. The standard absorption is, on close examination, missing what the line is actually saying.
What the line is actually saying is more specific than the standard reading allows for. The line is saying, in some real way, that the man who has been doing the work has identified the structural feature of the wider human project that is most worth investing his remaining attention in. The identification is not, on close examination, sentimental. The identification is, more accurately, the considered conclusion of a man who has, by virtue of his forty years of work, considerably more access to the available information about how the wider human project actually operates than most of the people receiving his line.
The line is, accordingly, worth reading as the structural conclusion of someone who has done the work of finding out, rather than as the inspirational quotation the wider register has been treating it as. The conclusion is the man’s actual position. The position is, in some real way, considerably more substantive than the standard absorption has been giving it credit for.
What the structural reason actually is
It is worth being precise about what Nye is pointing at, because the standard reading has tended to absorb the line as if it were calibrated to a vague enthusiasm about scientific progress, when the actual claim is structurally specific.
The claim is that the various problems the wider human project is currently facing, including the climate problem, the energy problem, the food problem, the various medical problems, the various engineering problems that the wider environment has been quietly accumulating across the previous several decades, are not, by structural design, going to be solved by the adults currently in charge. The adults currently in charge are mostly going to retire, die, or otherwise exit the wider project before the problems are solved. The problems are going to be solved, if they get solved, by the people who are currently young.
This is not, on close examination, a controversial claim. The claim is structurally just true, in the same way the claim that next year’s tomatoes will be grown by people who planted them this year is structurally just true. The wider register has, however, mostly absorbed the claim as if it were a piece of optimistic framing rather than as the structural observation it actually is. The framing has produced, in considerable proportions of the wider population, the implicit assumption that the various problems are going to be solved by someone else, somewhere else, at some point in the future, on a timeline that does not require the current population to particularly engage with the underlying work.
Nye, on the available evidence of forty years of performing the work, has been refusing this implicit framing. The refusing is what the line is, in some real way, the structural product of. The line is not, on close examination, an inspirational gesture. The line is, more specifically, the considered conclusion of a man who has noticed that the wider project’s actual labor force is, by structural necessity, the young people who have not yet been adequately equipped to do the work.
What the young people are not, on close examination, currently being equipped with
The honest acknowledgment is that the wider educational infrastructure has not, on the available evidence, been particularly successful at equipping young people with the structural capacity to do the work Nye is pointing at.
The infrastructure has been, in many cases, calibrated to producing students who can perform well on the various standardized tests the wider register has been calibrated to register. The performance is real. The performance is also, on close examination, structurally distinct from the underlying capacity to actually do the work of figuring out how the wider environment operates. The two are, in some real way, almost entirely different skills. The first skill is the skill of producing the surface presentations that the testing infrastructure has been calibrated to register. The second skill is the skill of finding out, in the sense the previous article was calibrated to.
The wider population that has been produced by the testing infrastructure is, accordingly, considerably less equipped to do the work than the wider register has been treating it as. The wider population can produce the surface presentations. The wider population is considerably less able to actually figure out how things work, which is the structural capacity that the various problems Nye is pointing at are going to require.
The implication is that the work Nye is pointing at is not, on close examination, just about getting more young people interested in science and engineering. The work is, more specifically, about getting young people interested in the underlying capacity to find things out, which is the structural feature that the wider educational infrastructure has been considerably less effective at producing than the surface enthusiasm the standard reading of Nye’s line has been calibrated to.
What I have noticed, watching the young people in my own environment
I am thirty-eight. I have, across the last decade, had various structural occasions to interact with young people in their late teens and early twenties, in the various professional and social contexts that adults of my age structurally encounter them in. What I have noticed, across these interactions, is something that the wider register has not adequately registered.
What I have noticed is that the young people who have actually been finding things out, in the structural sense Nye is pointing at, are considerably rarer than the wider register would predict. The young people who have been performing the surface presentations of having been informed are considerably more common. The two are, by every available measure of how they actually function in conversation, structurally different. The first group can actually engage with the underlying mechanisms of whatever is being discussed. The second group can produce the various standard responses to the various standard prompts, in ways that satisfy the surface requirements of the conversation without producing the underlying engagement.
What I have also noticed is that the young people in the first group are, on close examination, considerably more cheerful than the young people in the second group. The cheerfulness is, in some real way, the structural product of the finding-out itself, in the way the previous article was calibrated to. The young people in the second group, by contrast, often carry a particular kind of low-grade anxiety that I have come to recognize as the structural consequence of having to maintain the surface presentations without the underlying capacity to actually engage with the material the presentations are calibrated to.
The implication is that the work Nye is calling for is, in some real way, also a piece of mercy for the young people who are going to be required to do it. The finding-out is, on the available evidence of the young people who have actually done it, a structurally better way to live than the surface-presentation alternative the wider educational infrastructure has been mostly producing.
Why this matters more than the standard reading registers
The standard reading of Nye’s line has been calibrated to producing surface engagement with the cause of science education, in ways that have not, on the available evidence, particularly translated into the substantive engagement the cause actually requires.
The surface engagement involves the various small acts of support that the wider register has been treating as the appropriate response to the cause. The donations to the organizations. The various social media engagements. The various small gestures of approval directed at the work that science educators are performing. The engagement is, in some real way, real. The engagement is also, on close examination, considerably less effective at actually producing the substantive outcomes Nye is calling for than the wider register has been treating it as.
The substantive outcomes require, more specifically, the actual sustained work of getting young people to do the finding-out themselves. The work is, by every available measure, slow. The work is not, by structural design, the kind of work that the various platforms calibrated to surface engagement are well-suited to producing. The work is, more accurately, the slow ongoing labor of providing young people with the structural conditions inside which the finding-out can actually occur. The conditions include the various small features of how the wider environment around any given young person actually operates. The features include the small ongoing engagement of the various adults in the young person’s life with the question of how the wider environment actually works.
This is what Nye, on close examination, has been performing across the forty years of his public work. The man has not, in any meaningful sense, been just delivering inspirational quotes. The man has been, more specifically, doing the small ongoing labor of providing the wider population with the structural conditions inside which the finding-out can actually occur. The labor is what the line is, in some real way, the structural product of.
What I want to acknowledge, finally
I am not, by any honest accounting, going to be the one to solve the various problems Nye is pointing at. The problems are going to outlast my available attention. The problems are going to be solved, if they get solved, by people who are currently considerably younger than I am.
What is available to me, more modestly, is the small ongoing work of engaging with the young people in my own environment in ways that produce, in some real way, the structural conditions inside which their finding-out can actually occur. The work is small. The work involves, in selected moments, the willingness to actually engage with the questions they are asking, at the level the questions warrant, rather than at the level the wider register has been calibrated to produce.
The engagement is what Nye, on close examination, has been performing for forty years. The performance is what the line is the structural product of. The wider register would benefit, on the available evidence, from absorbing what this implies about how the work the line is calling for is actually conducted, rather than absorbing the line as the inspirational quotation the wider register has been treating it as. The conducting is what the next several decades of the wider human project is, in some real way, going to be quietly riding on, whether the wider register is currently prepared for it or not.
