quarrel | the A-B-Cs (Reply)

Claim: The subjects of biology, chemistry, and physics tend to be taught in that specific order in American high schools, and have been for over a century, as a result of one of the earliest national education standardization efforts: the Report of the Committee [of Ten] on Secondary School Studies, 1892.

Several official-sounding sources make this claim, including Wikipedia. And there’s a lot of present-day dissatisfaction with that subject order, often coupled with claims that there was no reason or a bad reason for it to begin with. I’ve heard speculation that the subjects were ordered that way because the Committee members all squabbled over putting their own favored topics first, which forced the chairman to arrange things in arbitrary order just to finish the report. I’ve heard one fellow with a Ph.D. and over a decade of teaching experience claim the chairman put them in alphabetical order because he couldn’t think of anything better.

Is any of this true? Well, you could always read the report, I suppose. Or, alternately, you could wait for someone to summarize it for you…

The experts on the Committee were divided into nine broad disciplines. One discipline was the “hard sciences” (my term): chemistry, physics, and astronomy. Another was biology: botany, zoology, and physiology. Initially, each group conferred in isolation and submitted a suggested list of class subjects by year for its discipline alone. Looking at just science subjects, they proposed this:

1st year:: nothing
2nd year:: just Botany or just Zoology - 1 yr, 5 hrs/wk; Astronomy - ⅓ yr, 5 hrs/wk
3rd year:: Chemistry - 1 yr, 5 hrs/wk
4th year:: Physics - 1 yr, 5 hrs/wk; Meteorology - ½ yr, 3 hrs/wk; Geology or Physical Geography - ½ yr, 3 hrs/wk; Anatomy, Physiology, & Hygiene - ½ yr, 5 hrs/wk

So it seems there is a definite genesis of the biology-chemistry-physics order in that first draft. The base claim is plausible, then. Next question: did they have a logical reason for that order? As it happens, yes.

The biology team put botany/zoology early because everything else in that discipline depended on them. The team didn’t intentionally position any of their subjects before or after subjects in other disciplines. They fell where they fell. For the hard sciences, the report explicitly says that every single team member thought it was more logical to teach physics before chemistry, but all members except one nonetheless recommended chemistry first to allow students more time to learn the greater amounts of math that physics requires.

Now, I’m not a master educator, so I don’t know if those are great reasons in this day and age. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not. I do know that the claims of alphabetization are total bunk.

Aaaaaand that’s the end of it, right?

Not quite.

The plan above was just the first draft. After the Committee compiled these separate team recommendations, it discovered some problems, like the fact there were no recommended science classes for the first year, and how there were only 22 hours of class a week for 9th grade but 35-38 for other grades. So the Committee convened as a whole and rearranged their recommendations into something more reasonable. Now the science portion of the plan looked like this:

1st year:: General Geography (i.e. Physical + Political) - 1 yr, 4 hrs/wk
2nd year:: Botany or Zoology - 1 yr, 4 hrs/wk
3rd year:: Physics - 1 yr, 4 hrs/wk; Astronomy - ½ yr, 3 hrs/wk; Meteorology - ½ yr, 3 hrs/wk
4th year:: Chemistry - 1 yr, 4 hrs/wk; Geology or Physical Geography - ½ yr, 4 hrs/wk; Anatomy, Physiology, & Hygiene - ½ yr, 4 hrs/wk

Notice how physics slid earlier? The hard sciences team re-thought things and decided they wanted physics taught before (or at least alongside) all the half-year earth and space subjects in 11th and 12th grade.

This plan, since it was more refined, is the one that schools should have been using as a guideline (though I don’t know how many did). As you can see, it went biology-physics-chemistry.

The Committee cautioned that it was still a guide, not an exact plan, and that they didn’t expect any school to match it perfectly. Then they went even further and offered four sample specific course plans depending on how many foreign languages the student intended to learn. These plans all slide physics even earlier, to 10th grade, for a few reasons: so kids who drop out halfway through high school still get more basic science; so students can compare different science fields earlier and more side-by-side, which helps them make better career choices; and so students in the more “classical” tracks can wait until 11th grade to make their final decision on whether to learn Latin and Greek or just Latin.

So now we have biology and physics tied for first and chemistry second.

The moral of the story is this: the real proper order for things is read, then talk. More Ph.D.’s should learn that way.