We Don't Teach Science We Teach Human Beings

We Don't Teach Science, We Teach Human Beings by Dr. Philip J Mirkin is a reflective, story-driven work drawing on the author's 35-plus years teaching physics, chemistry, and mathematics across South African and New Zealand classrooms. Rather than presenting a conventional pedagogical argument, the book uses autoethnography which is a personal narrative rooted in the author's own cultural and professional experience to explore what actually happens in the encounter between a science teacher and a student's inner life.

Central to the book are two concepts original to Mirkin's thinking: "wreality," the individualised, ever-evolving picture of reality each person constructs by integrating science, culture, religion, and lived experience; and "evholution," a fusion of evolution and holism describing how both scientific understanding and human consciousness must grow together. Structured around dozens of classroom anecdotes and reflections that covers student encounters, subject-specific teaching moments in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and broader meditations on identity, spirituality, and meaning. The book argues that science education's deepest value lies not in exam preparation but in cultivating curiosity, moral responsibility, and engagement with reality in its fullest sense.

The author is candid that the book is inductive rather than argumentative, and that some material which includes accounts of unusual or spiritual experiences, and frank discussion of sensitive classroom situations, sits outside conventional academic framing, inviting readers to test the ideas against their own experience rather than accept a settled thesis.

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