First Steps

[Author's note: This is chapter one to "Why American Can't Think," a book in progress. This chapter discusses my own beginning interest in science and the start of science education in schools. I've just expanded it to include some science. Should it be longer? What's missing? Comments are welcome.]

School ruins summer. Growing up, as I did, in a sleepy beach community, the summer was the time, well, to go to the beach. For a nine-year old child who just finished fifth grade, it was a great time to forget about school and have fun. So, what was I doing in summer school?

My parents had put me in that veritable prison. It might have been to get me out of the way so that my mother wouldn't be overwhelmed by handling my six-year old brother and my three-year old sister as well as me. Here I was, imprisoned day after day with the summer just outside of the school windows. Fate plays strange tricks with life. And so the long-past summer, that had threatened to be interminable, introduced me to science.

Probably because of some teaching fad of the time, I walked into an unstructured class in a large uncrowded room where students did various projects. Projects? Where were the tests that I had become so good at taking? I had learned that only test scores really counted, and I had learned how to do well on tests. It's a wonderful skill for your school years and not much use afterward, except for taking the exam for a driver's license and the like.

We could do projects because the class was small, only about a dozen students with two teachers. Not really poor or wealthy, our town got by, but had great schools anyway. This was California before the tax revolts of the 80s. Rated near the top in the country in education, California's education system has been devastated by the tax-limiting proposition 13, and now it's near the bottom.

Students in my class had to present their projects to the class at the end of the semester. Some did creative stuff; others were involved in play acting. I was lost. Nothing that the others were doing held any interest for me. I found a book; maybe a teacher handed it to me. It was about science experiments, and it fascinated me. I wanted to do those experiments.

My scope was limited by the materials at hand. We did not have any chemicals or fancy equipment. After all, this was fifth grade. We were only ten years old, although I was nine due to skipping third grade. I ended up working with flasks, stoppers, tubing, and other similar stuff to create demonstration experiments showing some basic principles of science such as air pressure making a fountain. It was fun seeing what I could do with a few simple pieces of apparatus. I tested each demonstration in the days before the presentation, worried that I'd flop. Everything worked fine, and I was happy to have completed my assignment and to get out of school for the remainder of the summer.

My experiments used atmospheric pressure, the pressure of the air all around us. I didn't know it then, but this pressure results from air having mass. A great column of air extending far up sits above us, pressing down with its weight. My experiments worked with two fluids, water and air. Fluids transmit their pressure equally in all directions. So, the force of all of those kilometers of air push down, up, sideways and affect everything.

If you take a empty plastic soda bottle and put some hot water (possibly from the tap) into it, shake it up, and cap it, you'll see the effect of atmospheric pressure. As the gas in the bottle (a mixture of air and water vapor) cools, the pressure in the bottle declines while that of the atmosphere outside the bottle stays the same. The bottle collapses from the pressure, equivalent to that caused by a column of mercury about 3/4 of a meter (about 30 in) high (101 Pa in SI pressure units). It's equal to the pressure of a hefty man standing on a square about 9 cm (3.5 in) on a side.

Another thing that I was to find out later relates to why a gas gets smaller when it cools. I put a technical explanation in Appendix I that deals with something called “kinetic-molecular theory.” Simply, this theory was supported by lots of experiments and suggested that matter (gases anyway) consists of lots of very small individual particles constantly in motion, whose speed increases with temperature.

It was to be four more years after that fifth-grade class before I found myself in a science class. As odd as it may seem today, I had no science in grades 6-9. That's right, even in my freshman year of high school, science was not offered. Today, some high schools require three years of science to graduate and recommend four. Science has been growing as an important part of school curricula for a long time.

Science had to be introduced to an educational system that had focused on arithmetic, language, classics, and history. The first formal science classes in secondary schools appeared in the 19^th century. In Great Britain, we have information from F. W. Westaway, who wrote in 1929, “Down to the middle of the nineteenth century, science was the veritable Cinderella of the British school curriculum. Science itself was making headway, but science teachers were few, and those few were engaged in fighting down opposition all round.”

You can imagine the conflicts as science threatened to remove, for example Greek, from the curriculum. Students had been learning Greek for, well, forever. Why change? We can guess that the impetus for change came from the Industrial Revolution. Inventors, such as James Watt with his improved steam engine, had proven the value of a scientific education. The schools had to educate students to play a role in helping their nation succeed. These schools weren't quite sure how to teach science, and the point remains contentious today. Initially, schools taught secondary science much as they taught history or mathematics. The courses were all lecture, reading, tests, and the like. Introduction of lab exercises came later.

In 2005, the National Research Council wrote in “America's Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science, “Since laboratories were introduced in the late 1800s, the goals of high school science education have changed. Today, high school science education aims to provide scientific literacy for all as part of a liberal education and to prepare students for further study, work, and citizenship.” This newsworthy report goes on to say, referring to science laboratories in schools, “During the 1880s, the situation changed rapidly. ... Johns Hopkins University established itself as a research institution with student laboratories. Other leading colleges and universities followed suit, and high schools—which were just being established as educational institutions—soon began to create student science laboratories as well.”

From these few references, you can deduce that science began to take its place in secondary education in the mid-19^th century and that science labs were first introduced very late in that century. We can surmise that science labs provided a vital opportunity for students to do science. When learning English, students “do” English by writing essays. My own lifelong love of science was sparked by the opportunity to do science in that fifth-grade summer school so long ago. Science became real, not just a collection of facts and words. Finding out about the world and discovering new concepts thrilled me to the core. I was hooked.

© 2011 by Harry E. Keller, Manhattan Beach, CA U.S.A.
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