Needed: An Issac Newton to Help Science Education : Learning: If we are going to produce a generation literate in physics, we will have to begin instruction in first grade. But where are the teachers?

My late colleague Richard P. Feynman liked to tell a story about a conversation he had with the Princess of Sweden. He would never identify its occasion, but his listeners knew it was linked to his receipt of the Nobel Prize. At one point, the princess asked, “And you, sir, what is your field?”

“Physics,” replied Feynman.

“Oh . . . we can’t talk about that. Nobody knows anything about physics.”

“On the contrary, madam,” assured Feynman. “We can’t talk about physics precisely because somebody does know something about physics. What we can talk about is philosophy or psychology, because nobody knows anything about those subjects.”

He would explain that those subjects are difficult, while physics is easy and that is why we know so much about it.

Well, if physics is so easy, why are we such poor teachers of it? At every level of education, American children rank near the bottom in their knowledge of science and mathematics when compared with contemporaries in other advanced nations. Furthermore, 95% of Americans are science illiterates.

To the best of my knowledge, the United States was the first nation to attempt to create a system of mass higher education. Historians may trace this to the 1862 creation of land-grant colleges. But the big boost came with passage of the GI Bill following World War II. That put higher education on a growth track that lasted nearly 25 years.

It has been a truly noble experiment. More than half our young people pursue some sort of post-secondary education; close to a third graduate from college. Instead of an educated elite, we have tried to create an educated nation.

Unfortunately, in the sciences and in mathematics, we have a small, educated elite--and a basically illiterate public.

Students who are trained to become scientists are not cheated by the education offered. True, science education is abysmal up to and even including college. But our students catch up, in physics at least, in about the second year of graduate school. Beyond that point, our scientists and engineers are--and will be--among the best in the world.

Actually, graduate education in science and technology has become a U.S. export industry. The role Greece once played for the Roman Empire, and Europe once played for America, the United States now performs for its allies. Historians may or may not ultimately conclude that this was the era when the torch of world leadership passed from us to others. But there is no denying that, at least in advanced technical education, we now fulfill the role traditionally reserved for previous world leaders. Yet at other levels of science education the story is dramatically different.

In elementary school, there is little to complain about. In fact, there is almost nothing to speak of. Elementary teachers have recently flocked to workshops to learn how to prepare lessons on vaguely science-related topics. It is also reported that the children often enjoy these lessons. But the teachers themselves tend to be so alien to the culture of science that it’s hard to imagine what the children might absorb from these exercises.

The word is that many college students choose elementary education for their major because it requires no science courses. If so, elementary teachers are not only ignorant of science. They also are pre-selected for their hostility to science, which they undoubtedly transmit to their students. Many young people come to believe science is beyond their abilities long before they have any idea of what it is.

Matters don’t improve much at high school. There are roughly 22,000 high schools in the United States, many of them required by local or state law to offer a course in physics. No one seems to know exactly how many fully qualified high school physics teachers there are, but the number is fewer than 2,000.

Why should I worry? I teach at Caltech, the inner sanctum of the scientific priesthood. Science illiteracy is not a problem here. But that’s hardly sufficient to sustain the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy: that an informed, educated public is indispensable to a functioning democracy. Furthermore, many of the most important political issues we face cannot be understood without an understanding of science. For example:

Should we sequence the human genome, a project that would cost upward of a billion dollars?

Should we build the superconducting supercollider at a cost of about $5 billion?

Should we spend tens of billions of dollars to build an orbiting space station?

Should we construct and assemble a strategic defense system, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, that shows little promise of doing any good?

Should we continue the war on cancer, which has been characterized as the scientists’ Vietnam?

In light of our long-standing political philosophy, it would be consistent with America’s contributions to world culture if we were the first nation to attempt the as-yet untested experiment of producing a scientifically educated population.

In physics, the proposition can be stated succinctly and provocatively. All Western thought for the past 300 years has been firmly grounded in the results of the scientific revolution that began with Copernicus and culminated with Isaac Newton. In the late 20th Century, any university that graduates students who are not thoroughly familiar with this revolution is in the business of dispensing worthless pieces of paper to functional illiterates. Especially in our era, a rigorous course in physics should be the sine qua non of any university education. At the very least, American education must now enter the 18th Century.

There is a huge body of knowledge, hence a great deal to teach. More, that knowledge is cumulative; you must understand its basic ideas before you can use them as stepping stones to new ones. And those fundamentals, many of them counterintuitive, take time to learn, to assimilate, to grow.

Our notion that we can take students and, in one high school year or one college year, teach them physics is simply absurd. They become convinced that it’s their fault when they are unable to learn physics. But it isn’t--nor is it the fault of their teachers, equally frustrated. More, it is not a problem that will be solved by some magic bullet, like a computerized classroom.

The solution is that learning science, in general, and physics, in particular, must be a life-long process. It must start in the first grade and continue on through college, indeed, throughout one’s life. The reason that can’t happen now is that we have no infrastructure of teachers who are capable of teaching science from the first grade on. Education authority is distributed in 50 states and 16,000 school districts, in a system of mind-boggling complexity. But it is clear what we must do in order to approach the problem: professionalize pre-college teaching.

There are two essential elements to teaching science. One is to know the subject. The other, more subtle and more difficult, is that you have to be able to remember what it was like not to understand something you now understand. That’s very hard, because each thing you understand transforms you for life. Nevertheless, the key to teaching that thing is to remember your untransformed self. If you can do that, I think you can teach just about anything.

That’s a tall order; I hope we’re up to it.