Congratulations to John Hubisz on his fine article and especially for his Herculean efforts to improve an area of our educational system in which our failure has such serious consequences. I am especially dismayed at the preponderance of textbook errors because my twin daughters will be starting middle school in the fall.
The textbook errors Hubisz reports are indeed remarkable. He also emphasizes the importance of precise language, but language adopted by the physics community contains an interesting dilemma: an apparent distinction between law and theory. Is Newton’s law of universal gravitation more fundamental than Einstein’s theory of general relativity? This is not merely a semantic distinction, as is evident in the debate over evolution: It is, after all, “only a theory.”
The call for physicists to take action is quite appropriate. However, one important component in the equation seems conspicuous by its absence from his discussion. Education colleges, by and large, have not been engines for real educational improvement. In our department, we have had to turn away students who were interested in pursuing graduate degrees in K–12 physics education; our college of education provides future teachers with teaching pedagogy but not physics.
It seems that the only long-term solution for the declining interest in and knowledge of science in the public schools lies in reforming teacher education. Physics departments need to play a significant role in that reform.
