Curriculum Molder

Riding a merry-go-round as a kid, M.I.T. Physicist Jerrold Zacharias learned to "understand centrifugal force in my guts." Recalling that experience is his way of making the point that children learn better through discovery than by rote memorization of formulas, facts, dates and names, which makes them hate and reject what they are supposed to appreciate and learn. In 1956, this conviction led Zacharias, spurred by growing national concern over the quality of courses taught in U.S. schools, to develop a new way of teaching physics to high school students.

The new physics course skipped superficial study of specific gravity, levers and inclined planes. Instead, it focused on making students grasp the fundamentals of modern physics, such as the particle nature of light. It tried, says Zacharias, who is the inventor of the atomic clock, to "present physics as the physicist believes it"--an evolving area of knowledge rather than a set of Newtonian rigidities.

The new physics has won spectacular acceptance. This year about 250,000 of the half-million high school students taking physics are using the textbook, films, and new lab experiments developed by Zacharias' Physical Science Study Committee. But the course is even more important as a pattern setter for turning top university scholars to work on school curriculums, a job traditionally left to school-level teachers and principals. As he finishes his tenth year of course reform, Zacharias, though he has a host of critics, is a major molder of U.S. teaching.

New Biology, New Chemistry. Zacharias' course reform has depended heavily on scientists with whom he has worked--Vannevar Bush, James Killian, Edward Purcell and I. I. Rabi--on such major projects as the atomic bomb. To Zacharias' surprise, the work turned out to be a chain-reaction affair. He found that he had to match high school physics with new science courses for the elementary grades. That in turn called for improving college teaching of physics, math, biology and chemistry. The endless curriculum-repair job has led him far afield. New projects include a study under M.I.T. Historian Elting Morison to reconstruct social-science courses and a projected overhaul of the medical school curriculum--an idea that Zacharias hit on while picking up buoys and downing martinis on a sailing cruise off Maine with Douglas Bond, dean of Western Reserve's Medical School.

Not for Dropouts. Zacharias helped set up Educational Services Inc. six years ago as a nonprofit educational foundation that coordinates a score of projects he is guiding, ranging from the writing of math textbooks for Africans to training Massachusetts schoolteachers. E.S.I, now has a staff of 45 and an annual budget of $10 million, much of it from the Government and such foundations as Carnegie, Ford and Alfred P. Sloan. Zacharias' own role has become increasingly that of a coordinator, gadfly, catalyst. He gets top scientists and scholars involved in his projects, presides over summer seminars at M.I.T., and obtains the money to finance the study projects, then turns to new challenges.

His success in inspiring schools and colleges to accept new courses, plus his knack for getting the bulk of Government and foundation money for his projects, has opened him to tough and sometimes well-aimed criticism. The "discovery method" of lab experimentation, which is central in the new physics, has been pooh-poohed by critics as make-believe exercises in which students are supposed to discover "what is already generally known." Alexander Calandra, associate professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, points out, for example, that Zacharias' physics has not stopped a long-term downtrend in student enrollment in the subject; the course appears to be too difficult for the average student.

Zacharias replies that the new physics textbook was written for students "who want to learn physics," not for prospective dropouts. The critics can also point to a study conducted last year at Brown University, which showed that students who had taken the P.S.S.C. course did not do better in college physics. Zacharias claims that students entering college since his curriculum reforms were started show a brighter, more imaginative approach to science.

Not even his harshest critics deny Zacharias' leadership and his ability to get things done. For Fervent Admirer Elting Morison, Zacharias is a "force of nature" that can move mountains. Francis lanni, of Teachers College of Columbia, believes that Zacharias has "done more than any other single being" on curriculum reform.

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