The New National Interest in High School Science

Abstract

An inspection of high school science by awakened security-conscious outsiders now seems at or near its end. The introspection demanded of all persons associated with secondary education, either in administration or instruction, is just now being precipitately set at a maximum level of need. Possible benefits from the introspection may more than equal those that will actually flow from the external examination. The sputniks and their forebears have eventually engendered a scrutiny that is marvellously late, and almost sure to remain inadequate, hazy and superficial. The present brief comment is directed to things other than better or right solutions to the many practical problems arising from the now clear compulsion to teach more and better science and mathematics in our high schools. These paragraphs are concerned with aspects of the problem usually slighted or overlooked in current discussion and proposals. Mainly, however, they are prompted by the omitted or hard-to-find emphasis on either the urgency or the capital importance of curriculum revision in almost all discussions of the question. In much that relates to their newly visualized situation, those who teach the sciences and mathematics in our secondary schools can share satisfactions with teachers of other subjects, indeed with the total high school population; but certain obligations are especially theirs. All can profit by an upheaval that might promise somewhat better and more serious education in primary grades, with the possibilities this offers for doing actual high school work in high schools; everyone will welcome promises of increased teacher salaries and more adequate support of the schools; and the numerous proposals for student aid in and beyond the high school can give a lift to student hope and purpose within that school. But, all coeval claims for other subject areas aside, the long overdue change that must now be made-compelled alike by our much-threatened national security and by an irrevocable sentence to living our lives in a scientific age-is precisely to begin a more extensive and better teaching of the sciences and mathematics. It is not for something else. The report of the President's committee on scientists and engineers (December 1, 1957) stated: There is ample evidence that the Soviet Union is bending every effort to achieve its goal of world domination by leading the way in the scientific revolution . Today Russia has more scientists and engineers than the United States and is graduating more than twice as many each year . . . . The education program of the (this) committee is largely directed to the secondary schools. Not only are the seeds of future career decisions planted during a student's high school days, or even earlier, but the courses he selects and the quality of instruction he receives frequently determine the possibility of his studying for a science or engineering degree in college. Following a moment of pleased amazement at the transformation implicit in the above quotations-present concern, even alarm, on the part of college and university faculties who were so little sensitive to secondary school affairs much less than twenty years ago-the high school teachers of the sciences and mathematics must fully face their quite unresolved problems and obligations. Only they, apparently, come to grips with an entire series of related circumstances: Most curricula do not now give, and never yet have given, enough years to the study of these subjects; the hours of the school day are fixed, and pupil-time added to these pursuits is also subtracted from one or another high school exercise or subject; is likely to continue to have much-perhaps decisivecontrol over the imperative national objective of having a much higher percentage of pupils enrolled in still more of these difficult subjects. One aspect of this item called pupil preference goes wholly unrecognized by everyone except some or many teachers of secondary school science. We refer to the conditioning of pupils against science by many teachers of the humanities in the high school. This