A friend of mine recently told me about an excellent series of home educational courses that she discovered years ago. The courses are provided by The Teaching Company, and consist of audio or video lectures about certain subjects delivered by prominent university professors from across the country. The courses are quite expensive (ranging from $199 for an audio download to $374 for DVDs), but my friend swears that they’re worth it.
To prove her point, my friend let me borrow the CDs for one of the courses she purchased. It’s called The History of Science 1700-1900 and is taught by Dr. Frederick Gregory, a longtime professor at the University of Florida. The course consists of 36 lectures (at approximately 30 minutes per lecture) spread across 18 CDs — and it was indeed excellent!
Each 30-minute lecture covered a different topic that showed how science developed in these two centuries. Obviously, 30 minutes doesn’t provide enough time to go in-depth on any of these topics, but it is enough for a casual listener to develop a better understanding of what was happening in science during the two centuries covered in the lectures.
Almost every scientific luminary of the time made an appearance at some point during the lectures, including Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Carl Linnaeus, Luigi Galvani, Antoine Lavoisier, Louis Pasteur, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), and more, as Dr. Gregory discussed topics ranging from theories of motion to classification of living things, biology, evolution, electromagnetism, chemistry, physics, biology, embryonic development, molecular theory, astronomy, and so on.
I found the lectures in this series to be extremely fascinating and interesting. Dr. Gregory did a wonderful job of not only telling about all the major events of the time, but also explaining the significance of those events — and he did so in a way that was easy to understand (without being condescending). You don’t have to be a science major to enjoy this course; you just have to be curious about the subject in general.
I particularly enjoyed the earlier lectures in the series, and was awed by the way early scientists set about trying to understand the world they lived in. There were some absolutely brilliant thinkers back then who have helped bring all of the scientific disciplines to the advanced states that they are in today.
While I personally find the prices of this and other Teaching Company courses to be far too high for my tastes, I would certainly recommend these lectures to anyone who doesn’t mind spending that much money. As for me, I’ll continue to borrow lectures from my friend whenever possible, and I’ll definitely visit a few different libraries around here to see if any of these courses are available to check out.