Revamping High-School Science: Herding Cats
DOI: 10.1063/1.4796815
Leon Lederman argues for putting physics experiences—whose understanding is enhanced by sketching speed-versus-time graphs, applying Galileo’s “isolate the system” idea, and drawing free-body diagrams—in the 9th grade with an aim toward molecular biology in the 11th grade. I suggest an ecology-based biology course in the 9th grade.
An ecology course, while including graphical analysis and the concept of the isolated system, would stress developing an understanding of and appreciation for interconnected and interdependent systems. Students might then have some rational basis for deciding that “individuals in community” is often a more fruitful conceptual tool than those offered by either the worldview of extreme individualism or that of extreme collectivism. Furthermore, physics teachers might be encouraged to read and study George Gaylord Simpson’s “Biology and the Nature of Science,” in which he said,
I suggest that both the characterization of science as a whole and the unification of the various sciences can be most meaningfully sought, not through principles that apply to all phenomena but through phenomena to which all principles apply…. [Those] phenomena are … the phenomena of life.
Biology, then is the science that stands at the center of all [natural] science…. And it is here, in the field where all the principles of all the [natural] sciences are embodied, that science can truly become unified.
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References
1. G. G. Simpson, Science 139, 81 (1963).https://doi.org/10.1126/science.139.3550.81
More about the authors
Vinson Bronson, (vinsb@mediaone.net) East Weymouth, Massachusetts, US .
