Curricula
In order to appraise the value of HPS to science teaching, it is useful to be aware of the history and diversity of school science curricula, and of the major debates that have occurred in efforts to improve classroom instruction. This and the following two chapters will outline the development of school science with a view to understanding present claims for contextual or liberal pedagogy and curricula. The fact of diversity and change prompts questions about the justification of different curricular orientations, and about the degree to which change is driven by educational versus other considerations.1
Natural Philosophy in the Curriculum
Science, then called ‘natural philosophy’, was introduced into schools, the few that there were, in the middle of the eighteenth century. Its introduction was not universally lauded. Theology, the classics and humanities were regarded as appropriate subjects for the elite, and basic literacy, numeracy and religion, along with simple trade and domestic skills, were thought appropriate for the masses. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Huxley, Henry Armstrong and Thomas Percy Nunn in England, John Dewey in the United States, Ernst Mach and Johann Friedrich Herbert in Germany and, earlier, the mathe-matician de Condorcet in France were some who championed a popular presence for science education.2 No sooner was science included in the curriculum than debate began about its contents, objectives, teaching methods and clientele. The clientele debate revolved around what is now called the
‘Science for All’ issue: whether science should be the same for all students, or whether there should be different programmes depending upon whether students were proceeding with university studies or terminating their education at the end of school, or simply having zero interest in studying science.
In Britain, a practical approach was widespread. Science was a servant of the Industrial Revolution, and this was reflected in educational endeavours (Uglow 2002). A noteworthy text was James Ferguson’s Natural Philosophy (1750), which went through many editions, was revised in 1806 by Sir David Brewster and was published in America in 1806. Brewster’s introduction says,
‘The chief object of Mr. Ferguson’s labours was to give a familiar view of physical science and to render it accessible to those who are not accustomed
to mathematical investigation’ (Woodhull, 1910, p. 18). Brewster went on to say that, ‘No book upon the same subject has been so generally read, and so widely circulated, among all ranks of the community’. Sixty-two pages of the text were devoted to machines, and forty pages to pumps. This applied, technical, everyday emphasis was repeated in other widely used texts, such as the twenty-two editions of R.G. Parker’s The School Compendium of Experimental Philosophy (1837), the seventy-three editions of J.L. Comstock’s System of Natural Philosophy (1846), and J.W. Draper’s Natural Philosophy for Schools (1847).
Draper stated what was to be a long-standing dilemma in the teaching of science when he said:
There are two different methods in which Natural Philosophy is now taught: (1) as an experimental science; (2) as a branch of mathematics. I believe that the proper course is to teach physical science experimentally first.
(Woodhull 1910, p. 21)
US colleges and British universities did not agree. Natural philosophy disappeared from American schools around 1872, to be replaced by high-school physics and texts that increasingly were filled with algebra and mathematical formulae, in which diagrams of common machines were replaced by abstract line drawings. Along with the new texts came the long-standing problem of the over-stuffed curricula. The New York State Department of Education issued its Topical Syllabus in Physics in 1905; it contained 260 topics, which, for a course of 120 hours, meant a new topic each half-hour of class time (Mann 1912, p. 66). This was the harbinger of the long-lamented US preference for
‘mile-wide and inch-deep science curricula’.
Not all agreed that the new science teaching was an improvement on the old, and, at the end of the nineteenth century, many, gathered under the banner of ‘The New Movement in Physics Teaching’, advocated a return to the applied, experimental focus of the old natural philosophy courses and texts.3 A part of this advocacy was for the teaching of the principles of science in science programmes, and it was reasonably held that a topic every 30 minutes, discussed in essentially a foreign language, was not conducive to children learning the principles of science. An example of the sort of science that the new movement opposed was the setting of questions such as, ‘A force of 5,000 dynes acts for 10 seconds on a mass of 250 grams; what momentum is imparted to the body?’, without students knowing experientially what a force of 5,000 dynes meant in everyday life. Could such a force, for instance, knock an adult down? Is it sufficient to move an orange on a table? (Mann 1912, p. 89).
US Science Education to the 1950s
There have been three competing traditions in US science education up to the present time: theoretical, stressing the conceptual structure of the disciplines;
applied, stressing the science and workings of everyday things; and liberal or contextual, stressing the historical development and cultural implications of science. These traditions have, of course, not been exclusive; like many borders, they are porous.
A significant trend in the development of science education up to the 1950s was the increasing recognition of the practical, vocational, social and humanitarian aspects of science, and the inclusion of these aspects in the curriculum. In many respects, this was a return to the past – a swing of the educational pendulum. Biology teaching, for instance, became less theoretical over this period (Hurd 1961, Rosenthal 1985). One teacher in 1909 complained that school biology texts were so encyclopaedic and theoretical that they were more appropriate for doctoral exams. After observing a class, the teacher wondered what meaning ‘oogonia’, ‘antheridia’ and ‘oospore’
conveyed to students (Rosenthal 1985). During the first half of the twentieth century, in response to a multitude of pressures – among them the Progressive Education Society, business and industrial demands, environmental problems, demographic changes and health concerns – school biology increasingly diverged from university biology. Finley wrote a 1926 text that stressed the
‘practical, ecological, economic, human welfare aspects of biology’. He observed that generally ‘the aim of biology teaching . . . changed from “biology for the sake of biology” to “biology in relation to human welfare”’ (Rosenthal 1985, p. 105). A review of these developments is aptly titled: ‘Emergence of the Biology Curriculum: A Science of Life or a Science of Living’ (Rosenthal
& Bybee 1987).4
World War Two gave further impetus to practical biology: disease preven-tion, hygiene and agriculture were all part of the practical applications that guided course design. Columbia Teachers College developed a curriculum that stressed the ‘content and methods of science in dealing with personal and social issues that have been raised largely as a result of advances in science’. The aim was to give a ‘clearer understanding of society [and] of the social function of science’ (Layton & Powers 1949). This concern with making science personally relevant can be seen in a report of the Consumer Education Society of the National Association of Secondary Principals. This report, The Place of Science in the Education of the Consumer, was published in 1945 by the National Science Teachers Association. It urged that science teaching should focus on knowledge that helps consumers purchase wisely and on procedures useful in the solution of consumer problems (Hurd 1961, p. 85).
It was not only biology that developed more practical concerns: physics texts up to the mid 1950s were also concerned with applied questions and gave everyday illustrations of physical principles. As Douglas Roberts (1982) has pointed out, it was common for the chapters on electricity to discuss the workings of the telephone, the electric iron, home circuits and fuses and everyday electrical appliances; the chapters on liquids dealt with town water systems, hydraulic brakes and other such matters.
There were predictable tensions in this applied science tradition. Some stressed applications at the personal level – hygiene, consumer decisions,
planting gardens, hobbies and so on; others responded to the demands of business for vocational skills and stressed the social applications of science (Callahan 1962). Others stressed understanding of the interaction of society and science. Present-day science–technology–society (STS) programmes are in the same tradition as these interwar applied science courses.
The applied tradition was criticised from two sides: on the right, so to speak, were advocates of teaching the theoretical, disciplinary structure of science, and on the left were advocates of the humanistic, cultural aspects of science. The Union of American Biological Societies criticised the tendency to teach biology, not as a science, but as ‘a way to pleasing hobbies, and a series of practical technologies’ (Rosenthal 1985, p. 109). It championed specialist, disciplinary courses. This call was echoed in the 1947 report of the AAAS titled, ‘The Present Effectiveness of our Schools in the Training of Scientists’.
It stated:
The report is based on the premise that our people should take such steps as may be necessary to ensure (1) enough competent scientists to do whatever job may be ahead, and (2) a voting public that understands and supports the scientists’
role in defense and in the design for better living.
(In Klopfer & Champagne 1990, p. 137)
In contrast, the Harvard Committee (1945) advocated a science programme in which, ‘the facts of science must be learned in another context, cultural, historical, and philosophical’. The committee produced a manifesto for liberal science education. It claimed:
Science instruction in general education should be characterized mainly by broad integrative elements – the comparison of scientific with other modes of thought, the comparison and contrast of the individual sciences with one another, the relations of science with its own past and with general human history, and of science with problems of human society. These are areas in which science can make a lasting contribution to the general education of all students. . . . Below the college level, virtually all science teaching should be devoted to general education.
(Conant 1945, pp. 155–156)
In 1944, the National Educational Association issued a report, Education for All American Youth, that proposed a liberal approach to the sciences for precollege programmes. In addition to knowledge of specific subject matters, science, by the tenth grade, should introduce students to the role of science in human progress, to the scientific view of the world and of man, to the history of science and an imaginative association with the great scientists and their major experiments (Hurd 1961, p. 83). Clarence Faust, speaking at a 1958 national conference of presidential science advisers held at Yale University, stressed this contextual approach:
What American life most needs, is a new respect for intelligence, for intellectual achievement, for the life of the mind, for books and for learning, for basic science and for philosophic wisdom . . . education cannot realize its promise if it is viewed merely as a means to individual advancement, social achievement, and national power . . . we need wisdom, not merely power . . . a commitment to the basic function of education.
(Elbers & Duncan 1959, p. 178)
Thus, at the time of the mid 1950s Sputnik crisis, at least three competing views about the nature, purposes and emphases of school science can be identified:
1 a practical, technical, applied emphasis;
2 a liberal, generalist, humanistic emphasis;
3 a specialist, theoretical, disciplinary emphasis.
These are akin to what Elliot Eisner (1979) calls ‘curricular orientations’.
Roberts (1982), in his survey of numerous science curricula, identified seven
‘curriculum emphases’. The above three correspond, approximately, with his
‘everyday coping’, ‘the self as explainer’ and ‘correct explanations’. Neither Roberts’s distinctions, nor the above tripartite divisions, are meant to be mutually exclusive. Curricula that stress one usually include something of the others. What is in contention between the views is the general orientation of the science programme and the goals that it seeks to achieve.
The serious educational issue is to identify the grounds for these curric-ular choices and then to justify the choice. Are there educational and philosophical grounds for the decisions, or does a society’s curriculum just take the shape of the last political, economic or special interest group’s foot that trod upon it? It is obvious that efforts to justify choices will lead to philosophy of education; justifications will need to appeal to the aims of education, to what is required for individual growth and flourishing, and to political understandings about the mutual relationship of individuals to their society.5
National Science Foundation Curricula (1950s–1960s)
In the early 1950s, American academics, scientists and professional associa-tions, with physicists at the forefront, led agitation for the reform of US science education. These groups were concerned about the decline of science and mathematics in schools. In the 40 years between 1910 and 1950, the number of non-academic subjects (cooking, typing, driving and so on) in US schools increased from 8 to 215, separate physics and chemistry courses were amalgamated into general science, and algebra became part of general mathematics.6
On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Sputnik went into orbit, and its shock waves swept across the US political and educational landscape. Dianne Ravitch commented:
The Soviet launch . . . promptly ended the debate that had raged for several years about the quality of American education. Those who had argued since the late 1940s that American schools were not rigorous enough and that life adjustment education had cheapened intellectual values felt vindicated, and as one historian later wrote, ‘a shocked and humbled nation embarked on a bitter orgy of pedagogical soul-searching’.
(In DeBoer 1991, p. 146)
Sputnik brought the claims of reformers of science education to national prominence. The launch triggered a flurry of legislation, the principal one being the 1957 National Defense Education Act, which gave $94 million for science education in the 3 years from 1958 to 1961, and a further $600 million in the years from 1961 to 1975. Conferences and meetings occurred across the country. A representative one was the above-mentioned Yale conference, sponsored by the President’s Committee on Scientists and Engineers (Elbers
& Duncan 1959).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) was instrumental in the transforma-tion of school science into proto-university science, a process sometimes called the professionalisation of school science. The NSF’s first school curriculum grant was for $1,725 in 1954; its 1956 grant to the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) was $300,000. The National Defense Act transformed this meagre level of funding and subsequently transformed US science education.
In 1957, the NSF said that its curriculum projects:
Seek to respond to the concern, often expressed by scientists and educators, over failure of instructional programs in primary and secondary schools to arouse motivating interest in, and understanding of, the scientific disciplines. General agreement prevails that much of the science taught in schools today does not reflect the current state of knowledge nor does it necessarily represent the best possible choice of materials for instructional purposes.
(Crane 1976, pp. 56–57)
In 1956, Jerrold Zacharias,7a physicist at MIT, used a small grant from the National Science Foundation to set up the PSSC. This was a case of ‘from small grants, big projects grow’, especially when fuelled by a national Sputnik fear. This committee produced the PSSC Physics text, which was eventually to be used by millions of students in the US and throughout the world. With its multiple translations, it was the most utilised science textbook in history.8 It was the MacDonald’s or Coca-Cola of education. The Spanish and Portuguese translations, along with scholarships to bring Latin American teachers to the US for training, shaped the form of Latin American physics
teaching for decades. The intention of PSSC physics was to focus upon the conceptual structure of physics and teach the subject as a discipline: applied material was almost totally absent from the text. As Zacharias stated:
One should always design a curriculum by picking out the end point and working back. . . . We should like them [students] to understand the whole notion of quantization, the whole notion of particles and waves . . . working backwards, we said it was necessary, clearly, to understand the electrical nature of matter . . . and then of course working back, Newtonian mechanics. It is also necessary to know why one believes Newtonian mechanics. One believes Newtonian mechanics because of celestial mechanics, not because of blocks of wood on tables.
(Zacharias 1964, p. 67)
With this curriculum theory or educational compass, it is easy to understand that teachers and classes sometimes never got back to blocks of wood on tables or, as will be mentioned later, ‘where to put a soufflé in the oven’; the allocated time ran out. As will be illustrated in Chapter 4, air pressure, for instance, is not mentioned in the PSSC index; it is discussed in the chapter on ‘The Nature of Gases’, and the chapter proceeds entirely without mention of barometers or steam engines, the former making their first appearance in the notes to the chapter. And, as will be shown in Chapter 6, Zacharias commends beginning to teach pendulum matters with a coupled pendulum and trusting that the class will want to understand the simple pendulum, but even this latter understanding will not encompass the multitude of applied uses of the pendulum.9
The NSF put scientists firmly in the saddle of curriculum reform, teachers were at best stable hands, and the education faculty rarely got as far as the stable. The PSSC project epitomised ‘top–down’ curriculum development; its maxim was ‘Make physics teacher-proof’. Zacharias stated that PSSC physics must ‘have the materials in a form which is refractory, which cannot be changed easily’ (Zacharias 1964, p. 69). In a 1962 explanation of its policies, the NSF said that, ‘Projects are directed by college-level scientists, and grants are made to institutions of higher learning and professional scientific societies.
Emphasis is placed on subject matter rather than pedagogy’ (Klopfer &
Champagne 1990, p. 139).
Trialing of projects did not always have the significance that the policy gave it. One teacher who participated said:
My own experience with that process suggests the results of classroom tryouts had little effect on subsequent versions. Scientists were usually hesitant to accept the criticism of their ‘science’ from school teachers unless very convincing substantiating data were provided.
(Welch 1979, p. 288)
The NSF supported the explosion of ‘alphabet curricula’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first curriculum to be widely used was MIT’s PSSC. Then
followed the Chemical Bond Approach (CBA), Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), Chemical Education Materials (CHEMS), Earth Science Curriculum Project (ESCP), Introductory Physical Science (IPS), Project Physics and a host of others. By 1975, the NSF supported twenty-eight science curriculum reform projects. A number of these were directed at the elementary school: Elementary Science Study (ESS), Science Curriculum Improvement Study and Science – A Process Approach (SAPA). During the boom period, millions of students studied these NSF-supported curricula: PSSC (1 million in 1956–1960), CHEMS (1 million in 1959–1963), BSCS (10 million in 1959–1990), IPS (1 million in 1963–1972), ESS (1 million in 1961–1971) and SAPA (1 million in 1963–1974). These constituted the major league of curricula. In 1976–1977, it was estimated that 19 million students were using the new curriculum materials; this number represented 43 per cent of the school population.10
Most of the NSF-funded projects neglected practical and technological applications of science. One review said:
There is little or nothing of STS in currently available textbooks. Our group reviewed a number of widely used textbooks . . . and found virtually no references to technology in general, or to our eight specific areas of concern. In fact, we found
There is little or nothing of STS in currently available textbooks. Our group reviewed a number of widely used textbooks . . . and found virtually no references to technology in general, or to our eight specific areas of concern. In fact, we found