A Burst of Reform

When he set out to revamp high school physics in 1956, M.I.T. Physicist Jerrold Zacharias sparked a chain reaction of reform that is beginning to push all U.S. education toward dramatically new ways of learning.

Zacharias' M.I.T.-sponsored Physical Science Study Committee used a simple principle: it got top university scholars to reinterest themselves in high schools, after decades of leaving such tasks as textbook writing to standpat educationists. University physicists, knowing the basic unity of their subject, were shocked at the bits-and-pieces approach of high school texts, and devised a thematic course now used by 30% of all high school physics students. The example was so appealing that other university scholars plunged into other school subjects. Now, math, biology, chemistry, foreign languages and even English are all bubbling with more new ideas than U.S. schools have ever seen at one time.

"Discovery." Zacharias' committee soon became a nonprofit corporation: Educational Services Inc. At its headquarters in Watertown, Mass., scholars and schoolmen joined to loose a blizzard of physics-teaching aids--53 films, 75 paperback books, such cheap props as ping-pong balls and drinking straws. E.S.I. has gone on not only to launch summer teacher-training institutes, but also to rewrite U.S. engineering courses and elementary-school science. Last week the Ford Foundation handed over $1,000,000 to help E.S.I, surge ahead on all fronts. Its most ambitious plan yet: revitalizing the teaching of humanities, notably history and social studies. What Ford is paying for, says James Killian Jr., chairman of the M.I.T. Corporation (and of E.S.I.'s trustees), is "the most exciting advance in American education today."

Humanities may prove a lot tougher to help than science. The key idea in "new" math and physics is "discovery": rather than memorizing Newton's laws of motion, for example, students are led through experiments to conclude that the laws exist. But history is a can of worms: its "truths" tend to be value judgments, not physical facts. However much a superb teacher leads a student to true investigation, not timid indoctrination, the final conclusion is partly subjective.

"Postholing." Nonetheless, E.S.I.'s innovators cannot help improving the dead-fact history taught in so many U.S. schools, teaching that ignores the new insights of anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology. Last summer, E.S.I, scholars in such fields met to mull ideas that boil down to one main approach: use all the new scholarly tools for probing deeply ("postholing") into one specific situation, rather than skimming over great hunks of history at a time. As M.I.T. Historian Elting Morison, editor of Theodore Roosevelt's letters and a key E.S.I. scholar, put it: "It may be that a student can learn more about American Government by studying original materials to reconstruct a single case--say, the events surrounding the building of the battleship Kentucky in 1900--than by reading all the civics books in print."

In fact, this is a highly sophisticated improvement on progressive education's old "project" method--an economical way to discover universals from particulars. Conversely, one E.S.I, group wants to broaden eighth-grade American history by including the entire North Atlantic community, showing the web of European rivalries and relationships that influenced the colonies. Also under way: new courses in the classics, grade school and high school social studies. "I wouldn't be surprised if within 18 months we had materials ready for testing in schools," says Historian Morison. It will be none too soon.

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