Lederman replies: I am most impressed by Michael Bretz’s scholarly letter, which qualified him to lead the crucial movement for reform of science education. I will certainly study the work of Bernard Lonergan, which seems to articulate the thinking that has motivated the ARISE (American Renaissance in Science Education) program. Bretz also touches on an issue that we did not have time to cover: The revolution must extend down to kindergarten and before. Young children must be inoculated against math phobia and must be continually exposed to inquiry-based science, consisting mostly of process early on, liberally sprinkled with Bretz’s Aha! moments. Descriptive nature, natural science, ought to precede ninth-grade physics. I will reread this encouraging letter many times.
The other letters are discouraging because they illustrate my failure to make the case, which I believe should be logically obvious and which is authenticated by the exuberant successes of some hundred schools around the nation. Those successes should also be set in the context of, say, the Third International Math and Science Study results, attesting to the failure of US high schools to compete internationally in science. The results tell us that something is seriously wrong with the way we teach science. Yet the forces of stasis will find reason after reason for the status quo. Ian Thomas hesitates to introduce electricity because its concepts are hard to grasp! Yet, electricity is all around the house, it is concrete, important to our daily life, and hardly exotic. Nevertheless Thomas is willing to include general relativity, after Newtonian gravity. I am sympathetic to paralleling history whenever convenient. However, teaching pre-atomic chemistry and pre-molecular biology makes no sense.
Douglas Giancoli’s letter is more hopeful and I believe that a few hours (with a few beers) could convince him that physics, taught conceptually, is not baby physics, but can be a solid, meaningful experience that uses the math taught in ninth grade to provide explanations for everyday phenomena that surround the students. The point of putting physics before chemistry is that it should provide the tools and concepts, and especially the concepts of atoms, to explain some major chemical ideas—for example, the periodic table, gas laws, or the formation of the chemical bond. Conceptual physics is also the unique introduction to all students of how science works. It is applied to the extremely simple phenomena of why things move, of falling bodies, uniform motion, the simple pendulum, and so forth. One can’t really believe that ninth-grade biology with hundreds of new words to be memorized is the correct way to introduce high-school students to a disciplinary science! Physics concepts in ninth grade serve first to apply the ninth-grade algebra and second to teach how science works, including such vast syntheses as achieved by the theory of gravitation.
Look at how the infant (scientist in the crib) learns about the world: It’s all physics. Also, we don’t want biologists to use physics to explain DNA, but we want biology to deal with DNA and, folks, DNA is a molecule, and molecules are made of atoms. Comfort with atoms will give students a sense of how those atoms can hook together in different ways to provide different functions. Here, qualitative thinking serves us well.
We never suggest using explanations before phenomena, but we do insist on providing the tools by which explanations can follow phenomena. The explanations can follow the phenomena after the basic ingredients have been learned. If more physics than was taught in ninth grade is needed in, say, a biological process, then by all means invite in the physics teacher. This will enrich the physics that was learned at an admittedly low level and encourage the taking of advanced physics courses after the three-year sequence. The same scenario can be applied for the chemistry that biologists must know.
In all of this, we must not forget the objective: to bring the science way of thinking to all high-school graduates. I believe doing so will in no way hurt future scientists or engineers. The curriculum should be rich enough to give them the advanced courses that can profitably build on the firm, conceptual, and process-rich sequence I am trying to describe.
