Abstract
The technocratic approach to curriculum design articulated by the Apparatus on Teaching group at Woods Hole would have received unmitigated praise from the national security officials within the Eisenhower administration had the new curriculum materials been tuned solely to produce greater numbers of scientists.The imperatives of national security required a no more nuanced view of science education than this; increasing the absolute number of technically-proficient citizens was all that was needed. The chairman of the NSF’s Division of Scientific Personnel and Education had little difficulty recognizing this. “The Government’s interest,” he observed, “is primarily in having the tools necessary for defense,” and it was increasingly apparent to everyone, as another divisional committee member stated, that “science is [now] the most important arm of defense.”1 The needs of the scientific community, as we have seen, however, diverged sharply from those of the national security apparatus.Thus, with respect to NSF’s curriculum reform program, what the government sought to purchase—primarily technical expertise—differed significantly from what Zacharias and the rest of the scientists at NSF were prepared to sell: science education designed to meet “the Foundation’s highest ideal”— the “furtherance of research as a vital part of the intellectual, moral, and cultural strength of America.”2 Given the leverage scientists possessed (the belief that only they had the appropriate training necessary to produce more of their own), it was clearly a seller’s market.
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Chapter 5
Alan T.Waterman, “Science in American Life and in the Schools,” in The High School in a New Era, ed. Francis S. Chase and Harold A. Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 84–85.
5. The contents of the New York state physics syllabus are described in American Institute of Physics, Physics in Your High School (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1960), 56–59; PSSC memo, “What We Seem to Know,” 11 October 1956, box 1, PSSC/OHC; PSSC memo, “What We Seem to Know,” 6 November 1956, box 170, C/K Papers.
Walter C. Michels, “High School Physics:A Report of the Joint Committee on High School Teaching Materials,” Physics Today 10 (1957): 20–21; Michels report to PSSC, “Committee on High School Teaching Materials: Comments by Walter Michels,” 31 May 1956, box 1,PSSC/OHC.The impetus behind this examination of high school teaching materials came from the Greenbriar Conference on the Production of Physicists convened in the spring of 1955 and sponsored by the Division of Physical Sciences of the National Research Council, see “NRC, AIP Conference on the Production of Physicists,” Physics Today 8 (1955): 6–12; Michels to AAPT Executive Committee, “Recommendations and Requests of the Greenbriar Conference,” 14 April 1955, NAS/CPP.
These examples are taken from Charles E. Dull, H. Clark Metcalfe, and William O. Brooks, Modern Physics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1955), 247, 310, 531. Similar examples are pervasive in the popular physics textbooks of the time.
Michels report to PSSC, “Committee on High School Teaching Materials,” 31 May 1956, box 1, PSSC/OHC.
Quotation from PSSC, “First Annual Report of the Physical Science Study Committee: Preliminary Edition,” ca. 27 January 1958, p. 4, box 6, PSSC Papers; PSSC December conference minutes, 10 December 1956, box 19, NOTE S 233 NSF/ODSF; PSSC memo, “What We Seem to Know,” 6 November 1956, box 170, C/K Papers.
Urner Liddel to Kelly, memo, 27 February 1957, box 33, NSF/ODSF; Zacharias interview, PSSC/OHC. The more widely disseminated of the new chemistry curricula was CHEM Study, directed by Glenn T. Seaborg, Richard J. Merrill, and David W. Ridgway, The CHEM Study Story (San Francisco:W.H. Freeman and Company, 1969)
NSF, Basic Research: A National Resource (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), vii.
Dael Wolfle, ed., Symposium on Basic Research (Washington,D.C.:American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1959)
For previous curricular norms in science, see, for example, A. N. Zechiel, “Recent Trends in Revision of Science Curricula,” Educational Method 16 (1937): 402–407; Hal Baird, “Teaching the Physical Sciences from a Functional Point of View,” Educational Method 16 (1937): 407–412; Department of Science Instruction, Science Instruction and America’s Problems (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1940); and “Science in Secondary Schools Today,” a special issue of the Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary-School Principals 37, no. 191 (1953).
Daniel Lee Kleinman and Mark Solovey, “Hot Science/Cold War:The National Science Foundation after World War Two,” Radical History Review 63 (1995): 110–139.
Jerrold R. Zacharias, “Educational Methods and Today’s Science— Tomorrow’s Promise,” Technology Review 59 (1957): 501.
Elbert P. Little, “The Physical Science Study: From these Beginnings,” Science Teacher 24, no. 7 (1957): 316.
J. A. Stratton, “Science and the Educated Man,” Physics Today 9 (1956): 19–20.
Judson Cross, “Note on Teaching the New Physics Course,” 8 March 1958, box 1, PSSC/OHC.
Explicit links to How We Think can be found in teacher-training books published throughout the first half of the century, see, for example, Elliot Rowland Downing, Teaching Science in the Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 53–56; Elwood D. Heiss, Ellsworth S. Obourn, and Charles W. Hoffman, Modern Science Teaching (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 93; and M. Louise Nichols, “The High School Student and Scientific Method,” Journal of Educational Psychology 20 (1929): 196–204. James B. Conant attributed the source of the “alleged scientific method” to Karl Pearson’s book, The Grammar of Science (1892), which presents a similar stepwise approach to science. Few educators, though, seem to have drawn on that particular source.
36. John Dewey, How We Think (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1910), 72
Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 72–73, 142–146; John Dewey, “Philosophy’s Future in Our Scientific Age,” Commentary 8 (1949): 388–394; see also Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 141–143. 38. National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE), Science Education in American Schools: Forty-Sixth Yearbook of the NSSE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 20
See Paul DeH. Hurd, “The Scientific Method as Applied to Personal- Social Problems,” Science Education 39 (1955): 262–265.
Percy W. Bridgman, Reflections of a Physicist (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 351; Judson Cross, “Notes on Teaching the New Physics Course,” 8 March 1958, box 1, PSSC/OHC. This view of the scientific method was shared by some of the biologists as well, see BSCS Steering Committee meeting minutes, 13 May 1961, BSCS Papers. 43. Zacharias interview, PSSC/OHC
PSSC, “General Report of the Physical Science Study Committee,” 20 August 1957, box 17, Zacharias Papers; Philip Morrison stated that although “to some extent we were pressed to make it a way to recruit scientists, we never—at least I never—accepted that as an important criterion.” Morrison interview, 28 August 1975, PSSC/OHC.
The scientific community, in the spirit of the Arden House Conference, continued its efforts to improve the social standing of science in the United States during this time.The AAAS appointed a special committee to examine the social aspects of science, which made its report in December 1956, see Robert K. Plumb, “Scientists to Help Society Meet Impact of Advances,” NYT, 31 December 1956; for the full text of the AAAS report, see “Social Aspects of Science: Preliminary Report of AAAS Interim Committee,” Science 125 (1957): 143–147. The AAAS followed up this work with the convening of the Parliament of Science in March 1958, which had similar objectives, see AAAS, “1958 Parliament of Science,” Science 127 (1958): 852–858
William L. Laurence, “Science Depicted in Lowest Esteem,” NYT, 2 February 1956.
49. Faculty meeting minutes, 21 January 1953, MIT Faculty Records, MIT Archives. On Zacharias conspiracy, see Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer:Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board and Texts of Principal Documents and Letters (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 600–601
50. Wiesner quoted in Jack S. Goldstein, A Different Sort of Time:The Life of Jerrold Zacharias (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 142
Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 77–79; “How Communists Try to Influence American Teachers,” USN, 31 July 1953, 83. A detailed account of Morrison’s harassment can be found in Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 149–160.
Jerrold Zacharias, “A Scientist Looks at Scientists,” in The Scientific Revolution: Challenge and Promise, ed. G.W. Elbers and P. Duncan (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1959), 134.The AAAS poll is described in Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux, “Image of the Scientist among High School Students: A Pilot Study,” Science 126 (1957): 384–389.
PSSC, PSSC Physics:Teacher’s Resource Book and Guide (Boston:D.C. Heath, 1960), section 1–3.
Jerrold R. Zacharias, “Into the Laboratory,” Science Teacher 24, no. 7 (1957): 324.
Judson Cross, “Notes on Teaching the New Physics Course,” 8 March 1958, box 1, PSSC/OHC
PSSC, Laboratory Guide for Physics (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1960), iv; PSSC, Teacher’s Guide for Laboratory Experiments (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1960), 1
82. James B. Conant, ed., Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), viii
83. Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1997), 307
96. Zacharias, outline of role of the federal government in education, 2 January 1957, box 37, NSF/ODSF; PSSC, “General Report,” 25 March 1957, box 17, PSSC Papers.
President’s Science Advisory Committee, Education for the Age of Science (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959), 15.
99. AAAS, “Social Aspects of Science: Preliminary Report of AAAS Interim Committee,” 144; on the economic boom of the late 1950s, see James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 313.
James R. Killian, “Maintaining the Technological Strength of the United States,” speech before the Women’s National Press Club,Washington,D.C., 8 January 1958, box 10, NDEA Files
Killian, “The Challenge of Soviet Science,” speech before the Manufacturing Chemists Assoc., New York City, 8 April 1957, box 195, C/K Papers
Killian to DuBridge, memo, 23 May 1958, box 8; OSAST; PSAC, Education for the Age of Science, 7–8
105. PSAC Education Panel meeting minutes, 21 July 1958, box 5, PSAC.
Walter C. Michels, “The Teaching of Elementary Physics,” Scientific American 198 (1958): 57–58.
PSSC, “General Report of the Physical Science Study Committee,” 20 August 1957, box 17, Zacharias Papers
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© 2002 John L. Rudolph
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Rudolph, J.L. (2002). PSSC: Engineering Rationality. In: Scientists in the Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107366_6
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