Serving Students, Science, or Society? The Secondary School Physics Curriculum in the United States, 1930-65

Abstract

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, into orbit. In the weeks that followed, Americans questioned why the Soviet Union, a country with only a fraction of the material prosperity of the United States, was able to surpass the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation in the race to outer space. In the minds of many university scholars and members of the public alike, the fault seemed to lie with a flabby American high school curriculum that was no match for the Soviet Union's merciless regimen of math and science for its brightest students. Quickly, the race to beat the Soviets in space became a race to outdo them in the classroom as well, with many educators and university scientists seeing physics as needing the most sweeping overhaul among all subjects within the high school curriculum, in order for America to produce the scientists and engineers needed to compete with the Soviets. After Sputnik's launch, the American high school physics curriculum underwent major reforms, yet it already had undergone what seemed an equally extensive change just after World War II. Starting in the 1940s and continuing into the early 1950s, progessive educators created a physics curriculum that related science to the everyday concerns, problems, and interests of teenagers as a way to meet the needs of non-collegebound students whose numbers in high schools had swelled during the previous two decades. After Sputnik, reformers advocated replacing the progressive curriculum with a discipline-based curriculum, as, for example, the one that the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) created in the late 1950s to promote basic research in physics and to develop the manpower required to compete with the Soviet Union in space and military technology. Both of these reform efforts influenced the high school physics curriculum over the long term, though at times in ways that the