Lederman replies: Herding cats must be absolutely trivial compared to accomplishing anything in educational reform! Nevertheless, we cannot surrender. Education, even the subset we call science education, is an enormously complex system and, as I have often stated, the resistance to change is impressive. That is why the science education curriculum in K–12 is so poor and so antiquated.
About 10 years ago, I decided to spend a significant fraction of my time to try to create and “sell” a coherent three-year science curriculum. Colleagues and I (collectively, the ARISE group, American Renaissance in Science Education) have thought through the steps we must take to achieve a physics-chemistry-biology (P-C-B) sequence in at least a majority of US high schools. We are making progress; with more than 300 high schools doing it right, we have only 24 392 to go.
Three years of science in a sensible order, threaded with three years of math, would be a major advance. Of course it would only be a first step in reform of pre-K to 16 schooling. But practical politics mandates that science education reformers move one sharply focused step at a time. Each step must be capable of amassing a consensus among teachers, parents, administrators, and the 134 other constituencies that make up our educational system. A next step, following the compelling arguments of Gary Kinsland, would mandate four years of science and add geology or Earth and space science. And of course my colleagues and I strongly favor elective science courses like advanced placement and more. We must then examine and restructure the K–8 science and mathematics sequence along the lines argued by Lev Berger and Donald Rehfuss. Here I only insist that the design be for all children and within a flexible set of consensus standards; there should be a variety of local options for branch topics and for implementing teaching methods. We want to stress connections between the science disciplines and between the sciences and the humanities and social sciences, as Paul Rutherford articulated so well.
Martin Stewart has reminded us that teaching physics to 9th graders may well exacerbate the problem of teaching to students with a wide variety of preparations. But the few hundred schools now experienced in the P-C-B sequence seem to manage, and as we begin to create a seamless K–8 math and science curriculum, the problems will diminish.
The only difficulty I have is with Vinson Bronson, who, in my view, misses the point. I do not advocate teaching conceptual physics in 9th grade, because of speed-versus-time graphs and drawing free-body diagrams. These are important examples of how science works—and they illustrate some of the advantages of 9th-grade physics over conventional 9th-grade biology. However, in 9th grade, students should learn about atoms, their structure, and their behavior in company. Atoms make molecules—that is the basic theme for all of chemistry and, increasingly, for modern biology. It is this hierarchy that recommends 9th-grade physics before chemistry and biology. My comment on Bronson’s last quotation: Biology is not at the center of the sciences, but at the pinnacle. Physicists, chemists, and mathematicians rejoice in the growing comprehension of life, and we are proud to support the pyramid, on top of which sits triumphant biology.
It is difficult for me to understand, however, how the “phenomena of life” are relevant to cosmology, astrophysics, particle physics, the solar system, the quantum principles that support condensed matter physics, or even the earlier phases of geological history. But George Gaylord Simpson was a great biologist. Why do I have an uneasy feeling that I am the one who is missing the point?
