On Colleagues and Clients

Teaching physicists will do well to overcome their present conditioned attitude of automatic opposition to professional educationists. We are still teaching by traditional methods which lack scientific justification; the eventual establishment of rational procedures in instruction will require sympathetic collaboration between teachers in the several fields and scholars concerned with the philosophy, psychology, and techniques of instruction in general. Although instruction and research operate as an established partnership in our universities there are many aspects of competition and interference between them. The growth of research to its present status as a dominant university activity was in part at the expense of the teaching function. It is no longer necessary to nurture research by depressing the interests of instruction, and it would be well for the universities and their students if the place of preference which research has been enjoying were now to be yielded, at least temporarily, to the teaching activity. A crying defect in science instruction is the use of untrained and inexperienced graduate students as instructors, a practice employed by universities but to a lesser degree by liberal arts colleges and scarcely paralleled at all in the public school system. Increasing enrollments are threatening the personal relationship between teacher and student, particularly the teacher's detailed comprehension of his students as individuals in need of specific and nonidentical services.