Physics As the National Language
February 1, 2008
It is my belief that every high school student should have to study physics for at least one year before they can graduate.
Your child asks you, “Mommy, Daddy, why is the sky blue?” to which you inevitably respond, “It just is.” In this time of Presidential Elections we seem to worship down-home-ness and being a common man (or woman this year). We have a culture of anti-intellectualism that has got to stop.
America’s educational system has continued to rank low on the world scale. According to a report released by UNICEF in 2002, the US came in a stunning 18th place rank in terms of education. The rankings were based on the literacy and science and math abilities of 15 year olds. According the study 16.2 % of students were below international benchmarks putting us right behind the rich and mighty Hungarian school system with its 14 % failing rate. Of course Japan had a failure rate of just 2.2%. This is flat out ridiculous! In a country that has mandatory, free public schooling for all its citizens how is it that we can’t manage to be among the top countries academically. In 2003 an international assessment found the US to be 9th out of 12 industrialized countries in math scores tied with another wealthy country… Latvia.
The reason why I am thinking about this subject right now is the controversy with teaching intelligent design in schools. First let me state for the record my opinion on intelligent design: “BULLSHIT!!!” I want to believe in God just as much as the next person but trying to call intelligent design secular and claiming that it has scientific basis is poppycock (I never get to say that anymore). On a side note (there will be many of these during my brain drippings), Darwin who championed the theory of evolution actually thought that evolution was proof that God must exist because how else could creatures have the ability. I don’t necessarily agree with this, I think probability and random chance is a much better (though less comforting) explanation, but it just goes to show you.
Anyway, point is, children are taught so much abstract science that I believe that it is hard for them to understand what makes science, science. Sure you can learn about the theory of evolution in biology or understand ionic bonding in chemistry but in physics you can actually see what you are learning. You can see gravity, you can feel gravity. You can make circuits and light light-bulbs and hopefully be inspired by an experiment that you perform.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, on 24.7% of high school students will take a class in physics, the only numbers lower than that are Calculus at 10.1% and trigonometry at 21.1%. For comparison, 73.9% will take a foreign language, 93% will take biology, 55.5% will take chemistry, and 53.9% will take both biology and chemistry.
What does this mean? In an age that is defined by technology, the United States is not keeping pace with the developing economies in Asia and Eastern Europe. America, the center of post-war technological innovation is being superseded by China and India. Every day in the news we hear people complain about how they were laid off their factory job so that someone working for peanuts could do it in Asia. That is the beauty of engineering. You can’t use child labor and you can’t use peanuts. Sure tech-support can be outsourced (ever called Microsoft for help?) but tech-support is to engineering what blogging is to novel-writing, it takes less skill, effort, and time. Engineering is a field that is hard to outsource and can provide job security to Americans at a time when it is increasingly hard to find a job. Richard Feynman said in his autobiographical book “Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman”, that he was often able to pickup other subjects very easily because he understood the physics behind why they worked. I’ve found this true in my own studies as well, understanding thermodynamics makes chemistry a breeze sometimes.
So here’s the practical plan. High school is 4 years long. It is my belief that every student should take non-calculus physics in their first year, biology in their second, chemistry in their third, and have the choice of either calculus based physics or earth science in their final year of high school. Why do I consider Earth Science so lowly. Besides the fact that I slept through a year of it with a 95 average (my highest in any science course I took), I find it to be rather trivial to be able to calculate your altitude based on the azimuth of the sun or to be able to name the angle of repose. Most of the key parts of the subject are learned in physics, biology, and chemistry. Students who have a solid foundation in physics will be better prepared to enter the high-tech job market and if they choose not to, will at least have a solid scientific background to draw from later in life.
When you grow up and have kids instead of saying, it just is, you might be able to answer their question, “Because the color blue disperses most easily when it enters our atmosphere thus causing the sky to appear blue”.
