Education: The New Physics Class

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Since last fall, eight carefully selected public and private secondary schools-have been teaching a revolutionary physics course designed by M.I.T.'s prestigious Physical Science Study Committee. Last week, talking to meetings of scientists and educators around the nation. Committee Executive Director Dr. Elbert P. Little reported first results of the course. Said he: "The reaction has been so good that it scares us—we're almost afraid to believe it."

The new course stems from the conviction of such committee members as Nobel Prizewinners I. I. Rabi and Edward Purcell that most high school physics texts and teaching techniques lag as much as half a century behind the times. Worse yet, physics is usually presented as a series of unrelated subjects, e.g., mechanics, heat, electricity. The committee's ambitious goal: a program that explores and relates such basics of modern physics as the wave concept and submicroscopic particles.

Water Flight. Last summer the committee (backed in part by the National Science Foundation) called in some 100 physicists, science writers and high school teachers, turned out an integrated text supplemented by ingenious do-it-yourself equipment (TIME, July 29). Throughout, the committee tightly knit together its subject material; e.g., wave action is presented early in the course, is later used as a common denominator to connect such ostensibly different subjects as light, sound, atomic structure. Concentrating on basic principles, the course even treats as broad a subject as heat in its relationship to kinetic theory and to the conservation of energy.

When eight high school and prep school teachers who had worked on the course took it back to their classrooms for testing, the reaction was prompt and positive. Item: at Exeter, Physics Teacher Judson Cross hustled into the shower room one night to break up what sounded like a water fight, found the showers full on and his boys shouting with glee as they "stopped" drops in flight by peering through simple stroboscopes made in the course.

After some uncertain starts, pupils quickly adjusted to a program that relies on analysis rather than memory. By stressing principles rather than technology, the program attracts girls who would shun the normal, gadgetized course, also appeals to pupils with widely varying talents. At Taunton High School, pupils have cut short their lunch hours to get in extra work, are apt to hang around the labs long after everyone but the basketball team has quit for the day.

Copra & Galileo. When Dr. Little talks about the new course at nonparticipating schools, he is swamped with eager questions. But despite these reactions, the M.I.T. committee is still revising the basic text, this week will start making a $2,000,000-plus series of 60 or more supplemental films for classroom showings. One film consultant: Hollywood Producer Frank (It Happened One Night) Capra. In addition, the committee is finishing a handbook for teachers, will soon start approving some 100 books for outside reading on such topics as nuclear reactors and Galileo.