Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of dispatches from the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 2021-22 Project Fellows.
In the fall of 1956, a group of prominent physicists began meeting regularly on the M.I.T. campus. They called themselves the Physical Science Study Committee. A few of them were Nobel Prize winners. Many of them had worked together during World War II, some on creating radar systems for the military and others on building the first atomic bomb. Their host, a towering figure in physics named Jerrold R. Zacharias, had done both.
But now some of the physicists who had helped weaponize the power of the atom were eager to collaborate on a more idealistic project: remaking science education in public schools.
The professors were perturbed by a particular problem. Recent discoveries in atomic physics were propelling advances in everything from health care to rocket science. But high schools in the United States, the researchers believed, seemed stuck in a 19th-century take on the subject.
Their solution: develop an entirely new curriculum, one that would introduce high school students to a modern view of how atomic particles and other natural phenomena around them worked.
“Physical science has meaning for present society as deep and important as that of the humanities or social studies,” the physicists argued in meeting notes in 1956. “Students are less aware of the part physical science plays in forming the assumptions of their individual life and that of the community.”
The meeting notes were just one among a trove of archival documents in the MIT Libraries that I studied as part of my Knight Science Journalism fellowship project. They captured an early moment in what would soon become an important classroom revolution, touching millions of students first in high schools and then in middle schools.
I wanted to understand the professors’ 20th-century effort to promote physics because I am currently writing a book on a similar, modern-day campaign: a national drive to boost access to computer science, the study of computer programming and computing concepts like algorithms, in public schools.
What should modern education look in an era of rapid scientific and technological change? Who is that education for? Who gets to decide?
It’s an extraordinary phenomenon that is sweeping classrooms from Pomona, California, to Plymouth, Massachusetts. And, just like the 20th-century physics crusade, the computer science education campaign has been driven in part by outside forces — in this case, by tech industry money, expertise and lobbying.
I came to this project already steeped in contemporary examples of education disruption. As a reporter at The New York Times, I’ve spent years examining how tech companies, education start-ups and tech nonprofits are remaking the classroom.
The archival research, however, gave me a chance to focus more deeply on how education reform campaigns tap into fundamental questions about public schooling that Americans have been debating at least as far back as the industrial revolution.
What should modern education look in an era of rapid scientific and technological change? Who is that education for? Who gets to decide?
During my visits to the MIT Libraries’ archival reading room, I also reflected on why I feel so compelled by these themes. On a personal level, I’m drawn to the history of physics and computer science in schools in part because education is my family vocation.
My grandmother was a school principal. My mother was a teacher. My father, a math professor at M.I.T. for many years, was the first person in his family to go to college. I teach a summer course for high school students on emerging technologies and their societal consequences. I believe in the transformative power of learning to open new worlds for kids.
I also believe that studying efforts to remake education can give us important insights into the groups working to influence how and what the nation’s public school children learn.
The atomic physicists, for instance, enjoyed an elite status in the 1950s as innovation superheroes who had helped the United States win the Second World War. Their clout enabled them to exert a new kind of power in public schools. In fact, it was the first time that dozens of leading scientists teamed up to reinvent a pre-college science course, notes John. L. Rudolph, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, in his book “Scientists in the Classroom.”
The physicists’ motives were at once civic-minded and self-serving. On one hand, they felt driven to teach school children scientific approaches to problem-solving that could be useful in understanding the world around them.
On the other hand, the professors also wanted students — and, by extension, their families and the public — to value scientific discoveries and support government research funding. Above all, they wanted to promote rational, evidence-based thinking in American culture. To do that, they argued that schools should make physics a part of the academic canon on par with subjects like English and history.
Today the push to spread computer science has ushered in a new caste of high-status influencers in public schools.
The attempt to remake physics, however, ultimately serves as a cautionary tale. Despite the physicists’ best efforts, enrollment in high school physics declined in the 1960s, according to a report from UNESCO. Some critics blamed the new course, saying it was too abstract and catered only to advanced science students.
A few years later, a separate group of physicists at Harvard created their own high school course aimed at a broader student audience. This time the curriculum took a more democratic, humanistic view of science. One course textbook I read asked students how citizens could ensure technological innovations were made “in a manner befitting society as whole.”
Today the push to spread computer science has ushered in a new caste of high-status influencers in public schools. Only instead of Nobel Prize-winning physicists, they are tech companies, tech executives and tech philanthropists.
These technologists in the classroom have their own agendas. Many industry leaders genuinely want students to learn computational thinking — a broad-based approach to tackling complex problems that can be useful in real life, not just in software engineering.
Unlike the physicists, tech companies also have business motives: They want schools to train more students to help fill industry jobs. To that end, some executives argue that computer science should be a core subject for all students on par with writing and arithmetic.
“Right now, there are 500,000 computing jobs open in America alone, but we produce only 50,000 computer science graduates every year. That makes no sense,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post a few years ago promoting computing in schools. “Coding is a basic skill and is something everyone should be able to do, like reading,” he added. “It’s something every school should teach.”
Given that school children in the United States get only one chance at a free public education — an undertaking with huge implications for their personal development, economic prospects, and communities — I believe it’s vital to examine efforts to reshape the classroom, no matter whether they are propelled by physicists or underwritten by tech giants.
Natasha Singer, a reporter at The New York Times, has received national recognition for her work focusing on the intersection of business, technology and society.
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