Foray of a Feather Snake

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.

Did anyone else read this short-short story in middle school?

"Test", by Theodore Thomas

I took the biology semester of my mandatory science requirement in…I think it was my sophomore year of college. One short quiz was multiple choice, with five questions and five possible answers, not counting "none of the above". One question clearly had A as its answer. One question clearly had D. One question clearly had E. The remaining two questions were ambiguous. Both could correctly be answered with either answer B or C. I answered B for one of the questions and C for the other, and I turned my paper in.

I got them wrong, of course. The correct answer for both was, in fact, "B or C".

Arthur Robinson is a curious fellow. He has a doctorate in chemistry and briefly taught at UCSD. He co-founded a medical research institute with Linus Pauling. He is the founder and former head of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the primary author of that institute’s famous Oregon Petition, which purports there is no scientific consensus on global warming and boasts 31,000 scientist signatures. He is one of the 700+ signers of the Dissent From Darwinism statement challenging the basis of the natural selection theory of evolution, which comes from the famously intelligent-design-favoring Discovery Institute.

In the late 1980s, in response to how political, anemic, and (in his words) evil the American public school system had become, his wife created a homeschool regimen for their six children aged 1.5 to 12. He claims the regimen worked so well that he was able to raise and educate all his children alone after his wife unexpectedly died before starting the lessons.

He claims that any child who is forced to do schoolwork (literally, as in physically confined and allowed to do nothing but sleep and eat until it’s finished) and is given an environment with no distractions (including other family members with less-studious lifestyles) is guaranteed to learn to like studying and successfully self-educate in any topic. Some will learn faster than others, but all will succeed eventually and all will enjoy it. The only exception is children who have already been ruined by too-casual conditioning, who are allowed to get out of work by throwing tantrums, who receive hints and help and encouragement when encountering difficult subjects.

The regimen is strict. Schooling occupies five hours per day (from breakfast to afternoon, when the mind is freshest), six days per week, for a total of about ten months per year. It’s not a ten-month span with two months of break, though. It’s year-round with many short vacations. Every single school day, regardless of age, includes two hours of math problems and a one-page essay. All problems must be completed and correct, redoing work as necessary.

Is it hard for him to administer? He says it isn’t. He claims to have spent a lifetime average of less than 15 minutes of education-related attention per day per child, yet had them scoring in the 99.9th percentile of standardized college entrance exams by age 16.

There are, however, rules that the entire family — students, older children, parents — must obey without exception:

• No added sweeteners of any kind in any food or drink. No saccharine, no aspartame, no sugar, no honey. All artificial sweeteners are incompletely understood, natural sugar impacts mental attitude, and any sweetening sabotages the human body’s natural enjoyment of healthy foods like vegetables.
• No television. It’s passive entertainment (which is bad) and it lets in the evils of societal norms (which is also bad).
• No use of computers or calculators until after calculus is mastered. Children are in school to learn how to think; they should not be distracted into conflating thought with data manipulation. Also, as a matter of foundation, they must become adept at performing the simpler arithmetic operations, such as division down to four decimal places, entirely mentally, otherwise their higher thought processes will be bottlenecked at unacceptably slow speeds.
• The only schoolwork assistance a parent is to give a child, ever, is to instruct the child to try again when the child encounters a problem he can’t solve correctly or a topic he doesn’t understand after reading about it.

He sells his curriculum for a couple hundred dollars. The bulk of it is a primitive proto-eBook library: TIFF-format scans of dozens of reference, history, classic literature, and textbooks, intended to be printed as necessary. The reference includes a 98-year-old dictionary and a 100-year-old encyclopedia. But that’s not a problem. The dictionary is unabridged, and the encyclopedia nonetheless covers 98% of human history (and besides, its age means it hasn’t suffered dumbing-down, political correctness, or multiculturalist revisionism).

Physics is excluded entirely until the child has mastered calculus and is able to personally replicate Isaac Newton’s entire body of work from scratch, which should happen at approximately age 16 (that’s grade 10-11). The child then gets full-bore physics, with no simplified or approximated formulas because those are misleading and wrong. If the child wants to use F = mg for the gravitational pull on everyday objects, he can — if he comes up with that formula himself, and realizes he can use it, and realizes that in real life, gravity is weaker near the ceiling than near the floor and pulls in a different direction in this corner than in that one. Also, air slows things.

His curriculum deliberately excludes everything beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. Reading is essential for self-teaching everything else for the rest of your life. Writing is essential for communication. Math is essential for teaching rational thinking and the existence of absolutes, and it’s the foundation of sciences such as physics, which is itself the foundation of chemistry and biology. Family Bible readings, household chores, and music lessons are crucial components of rearing his children but are expressly separate from their education. Other “academic” studies like foreign languages are left as hobbies. The kids can pursue them on their own time if they want, but it’s utterly voluntary and on the side. School is for fundamentals.

What are his goals? They seem simple. He wants children to learn

1. questions have correct answers,
2. those answers are determinable, and
3. the child can determine them — all by herself.

He is a proponent of absolute morality. Killing humans for convenience is wrong, period, in all cases, not wrong most of the time but right if it’s a fetus (even in the case of rape). Any given activity, such as watching television, is either bad for you or it isn’t. If it isn’t bad, the only proper amount to let a person indulge in is “as much as that person wants”. If it is bad, the only proper amount is “none whatsoever”. Therefore television is banned in his house. And not just for the kids, because, for example, even if it weren’t bad, there is no logical justification behind limiting the 4-year-old to half an hour a day but letting the 40-year-old watch as much as he wants. That only teaches the kid the immoral, despicable lesson that it’s okay to apply stricter regulations to other people than to yourself.

His policies haven’t always helped his children. They’ve been attacked twice. The first time, in the early 80s, armed Child Protection Service agents interrogated his family and friends, and one son was held at a medical clinic under a law that mandates that medical professionals who suspect a domestic issue must contact authorities and fabricate false medical claims to detain the child. A clinician became concerned when she saw this large family all packed into a single pickup truck, and the agents cited the children’s unusually quiet demeanor as suspicious, presumably indicating fear due to abuse or an abduction in progress. Robinson asserts the authorities were interested less in helping children and more in the $100,000 federal payout their state got per child rescued, and thus viewed his family as an easy half-million bonus check.

The second time was in March of this year. Three of his children, now graduate students in nuclear engineering at Oregon State University, were blocked from their degrees and expelled for no apparent reason. Robinson claims it’s retaliation for his political stance against the university, including his running for a Republican seat in the House of Representatives against a Democrat incumbent with long, strong ties to OSU. The university says the claims are meritless and that it’s illegal for them to discuss details publicly without the students’ consent.

This year’s Miss USA pageant picked one of its fifteen semifinalists by posing three questions to all the contestants, recording their answers, putting these videos on the internet, and opening them up to a public vote. Those questions were:

• Have you, or would you, use an online dating service?
• Should evolution be taught in schools?
• How do you feel about being in a tasteful nude photo shoot?

#2 caused a bit of a stir.

Numerous news agencies and Scientific American magazine report that only two of the fifty-one contestants “backed evolution”. I have no idea where these journalists got that count, but even though the vast majority of answers were vague or wishy-washy, the count of contestants who personally believe that evolution is real and/or technically answered the question “yes” is far higher than two. At least three said they personally believe evolution is a real phenomenon. About ten straight-up said it should be taught. Then we get into the ones who are only kind of in favor of it but not really supporters. About ten more were weakly in favor of teaching it or favored teaching it with some hamstringing qualifying condition, like making it an elective or only teaching the observable facts supporting it but not the theory itself. Over twenty more advised teaching it along with “the alternative” or “everything” and letting the kids decide for themselves what to believe. (See this link for fairly accurate breakdown and quote sample.)

The blog entry at It’s Not a Lecture summarizes things best, I think: this was a popularity contest, for crying out loud, not a policy discussion. Of course the contestants will be wishy-washy and noncommittal. Like, duhhh!They’re not trying to give thoughtful, rational answers. They’re trying to schmooze as many different viewers as they can. It’s a tempest in a teapot, deliberately constructed so by pageant officials (probably) to turn more heads their way.

So are the contestants’ stances indicative of the attitude of America in general? Well, they can’t logically be considered so. The environment of the question and non-randomness of the sample mean you can’t extrapolate like that. On the other hand, if you look at what typical Americans actually believe, the Miss USA hopefuls were comparatively pro-science. According to a 2010 Gallup poll, 40% of Americans are Young Earth Creationists. Other polls put the figure closer to half the country, and Gallup’s own earlier polls meander between 40% and 50% going back to 1980. Two out of five Americans believe the Judeo-Christian God created the Earth and universe similar to their current state a mere six to ten thousand years ago. Two of the remaining three believe that life did evolve over eons but God guided and/or invented the process.

Convincing people of things is hard. Very hard. Facts do a lousy job by themselves. Worse, this issue is scattered with misinformation, overloaded terms, and preconceived notions, circumstantial evidence, and deep political and religious convictions. There’s the notion that scientists favor evolution because their real goal is not to discover knowledge but rather to spread their atheist faith. There’s the notion that so many scientists favor evolution only because lots of other scientists do, not because each scientist weighed the evidence personally and came to an independent conclusion. When Young Earth and intelligent design explanations are dismissed or excluded from curricula, it’s because of a conspiracy to squelch dissent rather than because those explanations were honestly found flawed or unconvincing. (After all, if you compete and lose, is it because the winner was better than you or because the judges were crooked?)

There is a problem of terms. In formal scientific use, an explanation doesn’t get to be a “theory” until it’s withstood a hell of a lot of testing. In everyday English, the word is merely a synonym for “educated guess”. “Evolution” can refer to the general idea that animals, plants, bacteria, and so on change over time, or it can refer specifically to the modern Darwinian-based theory of that process’s details (which you can disagree with without rejecting the former).

A big problem is the idea that the evolution explanation and the creation explanation are equal alternatives in a 50/50 conflict of opinions — opinions being those things that everyone is entitled to (with exactly as much weight as everyone else’s) and that, by definition, cannot be incorrect (since that status can apply only to knowledge). This notion permeates the Miss USA answers and most public comment threads on the interview controversy.

I asked an acquaintance who’s a moderator on the atheism and skeptics StackOverflow sites for advice. His approach is to point out that the modern theory of evolution doesn’t say a thing about how life began, so it doesn’t contradict the idea that God created life. He follows that up by pointing out that, if you were to design life yourself, how smart it would be to design a way for living things to get more survivable over time. That gets them un-defensive enough to listen to evidence supporting evolution’s existence. I’m not sure how he approaches the fundamentalists who point out that even though evolutionary theory doesn’t claim an act of God didn’t start life, it does contradict the Christian creation story, or who believe random changes and natural selection can account for minor variations between or within similar species (say, wolves to foxes or horses to zebras) but not macroevolution (like plankton to giraffes).

From Nickelodeon to Launch Team Umizoomi Preschool Math Kits Exclusively at Toys"R"Us Stores in July:

Nickelodeon worked with a team of educational consultants to develop the Team Umizoomi Preschool Math Kits, which cover the nine areas of math preschoolers need to know before starting kindergarten: numbers, counting, patterns, shapes, measuring, positioning, sorting, classification and reasoning. [emphasis mine]