Introduction
It is always a mixed pleasure for me to attempt to describe
events of my past. On the one hand, I enjoy the nostalgia
that accompanies any such effort. On the other hand, in the
process, I invariably realize that my reconstruction of
events would have been far easier had I done it when I still
had a reliable memory. In any case, as I sit down to write
about my early days in the PSSC project I’ve decided that my
memory of those days is probably more to the point than the
results that any non-participant could ferret out from
researching whatever officially recorded facts might be
found.
Illinois Becomes
Involved As my memory
has it, sometime during the fall of 1956, Wheeler Loomis,
head of the University of Illinois Physics Department, was
approached by Jerrold Zacharias, initiator and chairman of a
newly formed steering committee of a Physical Sciences Study
Committee (PSSC) that he had established at MIT. The
membership of that steering committee, replete with
university presidents, CEOs, and Nobel Prize winners, is
convincing proof that, in those days, we lived in a world
very different from the one in which we find ourselves
today. Leaders in government, industry and academia were
deeply concerned by the rate at which the USSR was building
its strength in science and engineering, and they felt that
national security demanded that this nation take action to
retain its leadership in those areas. Loomis and Zacharias
had worked closely together at MIT during World War II. That
relationship led Zacharias to approach Loomis with a
suggestion that the latter might explore with his faculty
the possibility of a collaboration between Illinois and MIT
in pursuing the ambitious goal that had been embraced by his
PSSC Steering Committee—creation of a new high school
physics course that would represent a dramatically different
alternative to then-current high school courses.
Loomis himself
had always had a strong commitment to the improvement of the
teaching of physics at the university level, and he felt
that the number of students enrolled in those courses could
be significantly increased and their quality enhanced by
improving the preceding high school courses and teaching. He
readily agreed to serve as chairman of a cooperating
Illinois group—if he could find sufficient interest in
forming one. His own enthusiasm was contagious.
Setting the Shape of
the PSSC Course Initially about a
half a dozen individuals expressed an interest in attending
a December planning meeting at MIT to get a better feel for
the direction in which the project was moving and to get
some idea about how an Illinois contingent might fit in. Our
interest in pursuing the matter further was motivated
largely by a deep dissatisfaction with the quality of high
school physics courses of that day (textbooks in
particular). Our bête noir was a widely used text book
featuring a picture of a steam shovel on the
frontispiece—misguidedly suggesting that it was an
informative characterization of the discipline of physics.
Another weakness in high school physics teaching stemmed
from the fact that it often was relegated to the care of any
available staff member—often, if not usually, to the coach
of a football, basketball or baseball team. We all knew that
had to be changed. [Author’s note: Today, fewer than 80
percent of Illinois high schools offer physics. Of those
that do, 54 percent of the physics classes are taught by
someone whose certification is in a discipline other than
physics.]
Following the
December meeting, a few of us agreed to spend the summer at
MIT to participate in further discussions about the project
in general, to engage in a more sharply focused development
of the text, and, finally, to explore, seriously, a number
of different roles that the Illinois group might possibly
play.
Everyone agreed
that a multi-pronged approach would be required to
accomplish the necessary major changes to bring the teaching
of physics more closely in touch with the modern philosophy
and hopes of currently active physicists. To realize that
kind of improvement, it was decided, among other things, to
give up the standard packaging and ordering of the various
parts of standard physics curricula and to start the course,
for example, with a broad look at the universe—developing
some basic understanding of the concepts of space and time
and of the process of measurement.
The
multi-pronged approach that was envisioned included, first
and foremost, a new text book, and work on such a book had
already been started at MIT. A set of new, inexpensive
classroom demonstrations and new laboratory experiments were
thought necessary to supplement the text and, for those
demonstrations or experiments that might turn out to be too
difficult or too expensive for the average high school, a
set of movies should be made as stand-ins. Those movies were
to feature distinguished, currently active physicists as
principal protagonists. Finally, it was agreed that a guide
would be necessary to help teachers implement the new
course. Somewhat independently, an effort was to be made to
enlist the help of a number of distinguished physicists to
contribute to a series of small, paperback books presenting
descriptions of their specialties or introducing readers to
the giants in the history of physics. (One of my favorites
was a biography of Galileo, authored jointly by Laura Fermi,
a one-time physics teacher herself, and Gilberto Bernardini,
highly respected for his research in elementary particle
physics.)
Finally, and
very important, Zacharias realized that with the adoption of
the new course there would certainly be a disconnect between
that course and the then standard college entrance
examinations. He successfully persuaded those responsible
for the development of those exams to create a different set
of physics examinations for students who had been taught
physics the PSSC way.
Producing the
Teachers’ Guide As for the Illinois
group, we decided that major participation in continuing
work on the text would be difficult at a distance of 1,000
miles from the principal authors at MIT. (Remember that
there was no Internet and no e-mail in those days.) We felt
that our group to work effectively should have a large
measure of autonomy, so that our work could proceed as an
almost independent entity. We asked for and were assigned
the creation of the Teacher’s Guide. We believed that such a
guide would be an important feature to upgrade the
performance of experienced teachers and an absolute
necessity to introduce neophyte teachers to the PSSC course.
Homework problems that were devised at MIT were sent to
Illinois, where solutions were worked out and imbedded in
the Teacher’s Guide.
Wheeler Loomis
chaired the Illinois group during 1957/58. I had a previous
commitment to spend that year in Italy on sabbatical leave.
When I returned to Urbana, I was taken by surprise when
Loomis asked me to take over the chairmanship of the group,
by then comprising about 20 members. Various chapters of the
text were assigned to individual members of the group in
accord with their expressed preferences, and they produced
drafts of what they thought was needed. We strongly believed
that, wonderful though the new course was in the minds of a
group of highly experienced, senior physics teachers and
researchers, many high school physics teachers would need
help to understand the why and wherefore of the new approach
and to learn how best to put it across. The Teacher’s Guide
was our attempt to provide that help. There was a heavy
traffic of materials—text book chapters from MIT to Illinois
and Teacher’s Guide chapters from us to them. Those
exchanges gradually led to a meeting of the minds and to the
preparation of two independent books, the PSSC Text and the
PSSC Teacher’s Guide.
Even before the
first editions were published, drafts were used at a number
of schools by “master teachers,” many of whom had been
actively involved in the production of the materials and
were ready to take the plunge of teaching the new course. At
Illinois, we were fortunate in finding a mathematician,
David Page, whose home was in our College of Education, but
who himself had both a strong background in physics and
experience in the creation of a ground-breaking new math
course, the “New Math,” that had been developed at Illinois
several years earlier. He taught the embryonic PSSC physics
course at our University High School. One or another member
of our group attended each of his classes. We and he fed
experiences, reactions, comments, and advice to the group at
MIT. Our group was also fortunate to have as a colleague
Gilbert Finlay, another faculty member of our College of
Education having a specialty in the teaching of high school
physics. He served as an adviser to us while also serving as
a liaison between the PSSC and teachers who were trying out
the new materials. One of the conclusions reached during the
“dry run” of the course was that it would be desirable to
add to the program a set of teacher institutes, which would
provide some further guidance to teachers interested in
using the PSSC materials.
In addition to
the production of the Teacher’s Guide, several members of
our group made substantial contributions to other parts of
the project. As I remember it, Charlie Slichter, Jim Smith
and, later, Leon Cooper — later at Brown University and one
of PSSC’s bevy of Nobel Prize winners — made significant
contributions to rewrites of Parts 1 and 3 of the text as
well as to one of the movies. (Leon Cooper participated in
PSSC meetings at Illinois, but most of his contributions to
the PSSC project came after he left Illinois for Brown
University.) David Lazarus and Geoff Ravenhall round out the
remaining membership of the original group still to be found
at Illinois.
With the
“completion” of the Teacher’s Guide,” I felt that the work
of our group had reached a natural end. A set of “yellow
pages,” to guide teachers through the lab experiments, was
added to the Illinois materials by the group at MIT.
Improving, editing, and updating were a continuing process,
and a new corporation, Educational Services Inc., had been
created at MIT to take over those functions. I soon became
more deeply engaged in my own research and gave up any
direct communication with the PSSC project. I also brought
to a close the formal involvement of the Illinois group.
African Postscript Shortly afterwards I
was unexpectedly called back for one final, fascinating
adventure. A group of faculty members at Makerere College in
Uganda had learned of the PSSC program and had asked that
they be given the PSSC materials and the training necessary
to introduce the new course to schools in Uganda. Zacharias
felt that it would not be wise to have PSSC materials used
in a setting in which students were inadequately prepared to
be successful. I was asked to go to Uganda, to visit a cross
section of schools, and to see whether or not such an
experiment had a good chance of succeeding. That I did, and
it is a whole story of its own. I was joined in Uganda by
Francis Friedman, the principal author of the PSSC textbook.
Personal Thoughts on
the Past and the Future
In closing I’d like to express my personal views concerning
the impact of the PSSC venture on the teaching of physics at
the high school level. First and foremost, it is clear to me
that the new course spoke and speaks in a language that was
and is consistent with the widely accepted physicist’s view
of what the essence of physics really is. Furthermore, the
course has been enthusiastically received by most students
and teachers. That observation has been amply supported by
talks that have been given as well as by opinions that have
been expressed in celebrative articles that have been
published on the web and elsewhere to mark the project’s
50th anniversary.
On the other hand, successful though the course has been, I
believe that it has addressed only one part of a major
problem—and a small part at that. The general public in this
country remains abysmally ignorant about science in general
and about physics in particular. Today, decisions must be
made about a host of complex, technical, and scientific
problems. The general public is ill equipped to make
rational judgments about the performance of its government
in addressing those issues. I believe that Thomas Jefferson
once commented that democracy would work only if there were
an educated electorate. We don’t have one today—certainly
not in the areas of scientific fact and fiction.
One possible attempt at a solution to this problem would be
simply to require a more vigorous exposure to physics
throughout students’ elementary and secondary school years.
In addition, though, I can imagine the creation of a new
physics course that would attract more attention and
interest, and therefore higher enrollments, than do today’s
courses. Such a new course, for example, might be structured
so that it indirectly introduced fundamental physics
principles by directly addressing those technical/scientific
issues that face our society today. For example, the problem
of providing for our energy needs while reducing today’s
dependence on fossil fuels could be studied. Such a study
could lead to the development of an understanding of energy
itself and to the existence of accessible energy in wind and
in solar radiation. It also could lead to studies of
radiation, absorption and reflection; to studies of the
binding energy of molecules, of the process of burning and
the dissociation of molecules and of the existence of atomic
nuclei and the phenomena of fusion and fission. Whenever the
wonders of a hydrogen-fueled economy might, in the future,
be promoted, any student who had been exposed to such a
course would be sufficiently sophisticated immediately to
ask about the source of the hydrogen and the energy required
to free it. Other current problems that could be studied
could be the energy savings of so-called “hybrid” cars, and
global warming with its melting of glaciers and raising of
the seas.
The above examples illustrate the approach of such a new
course. In implementing that approach it would be essential
to treat subjects with scrupulous objectivity, presenting
all the “pros” and “cons” in a manner that would be a
self-teaching demonstration of how scientists treat
experimentally established facts and data. At the same time
every opportunity should be seized to remind students that
the beauty of physics lies in its support of the unstinting
drive of human beings to understand more about their
surroundings ---- from the sub-microscopically small to the
unlimitedly large.
