Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (review)

There is an adage that committees are where good ideas go to die. Yet a compelling theme in the history of twentieth-century science and technology is that committees of experts are where ideas go to give birth. Given the right set of circumstances—political momentum, generous funding, dedicated participants—a committee's recommendations can have a ripple effect upon the intellectual discourse and the social institutions of a nation. John Rudolph provides an excellent example of this phenomenon with his meticulously researched and well-written study of the role of scientists in developing science curricula for secondary schools during the 1950s.

In the postwar era, the first wave of the American baby-boom generation had begun entering school systems that were unprepared for the inflow. Teachers were in short supply, and government projections indicated a decline in scientific and technical labor that could put the U.S. economy and national security at risk. The rapid expansion of science and technology to fuel the nation's military preparedness and increase consumer options also brought concern about issues such as pollution and atomic fallout. Then came Sputnik, a galvanizing symbol of the threat of Soviet dominance in science and technology.

Rudolph argues that scientists coupled their response to the political need for reform in science education with concern that "the public" needed to separate science from technology and grasp the importance of basic scientific research so fundamental to intellectual freedom. Physicist Jerold Zacharias, who chaired the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC), adopted the culture of MIT's weapons laboratory—loosely organized, with an openly collaborative approach to tasks—as the model to guide the committee's interactions and a new systems engineering vision for science education. The PSSC created films, textbooks, and study guides to fill out a fifty-minute class period, leaving no room for teacher misinterpretation. The Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) followed the PSSC model, though the diversity of biological research posed problems in presenting the neat package that the PSSC developed.

Support for these projects came from the National Science Foundation and from other government agencies and private foundations. Believing their own knowledge to be sufficient, scientists developing the curriculum saw no need to consult with the professional education community regarding design or implementation. Despite this, Rudolph contends that the PSSC had a ripple effect on education, setting the standard for curriculum projects in other sciences and providing the National Science Foundation with "an operational approach subsequently embraced by the [U.S.] Office of Education for nonscience subjects" (p. 110).

For those interested in the relations between technology and culture, there is much to appreciate in this book. The stories of the PSSC and the BSCS illustrate the history of science education as social technology and cultural reproduction. The developers of the new science curriculum wanted to separate pure science not only from technology but from the humanities as well, and to instill rational empiricism into the hearts and minds of students—future voters and supporters of scientific endeavor. The projects aimed to democratize the public's understanding of science while simultaneously hoping to engage and propagate the next generation of intellectual elite from among the masses. The PSSC achieved separation of physics from its technological products by eliminating everyday examples of physics at work, but it did not recognize the instruments used in experiments as technology in the same way. The BSCS approached biology through humans and the environment, thus crossing into the realm of current technological disasters, such as pollution, and social problems, such as overpopulation.

In the end, the PSSC and BSCS projects offered idealized versions of science that denied or downplayed their technological roots. Rudolph effectively shows how social and political forces influenced the idyllic conception of science produced by these committees to reform science education. His book is a welcome...