Old physcist turned engineer here. You aren't really going to understand the issues they are considering at the frontier before you understand and master the basics. And it takes a long time to learn the basics. Now I think that some of the fundamentals can be taught better using more modern techniques - the Gibbs/Heavyside formulation of electromagnetism is probably getter handled via a geometric calculus formulation - which also better prepares the student for dealing with spin issues in Quantum Mechanics, but you need to get the student familiar with a lot of areas and techniques before you can start handling the research issues. My experience is that some seminar classes for the best undergraduate students may be approaching such areas in their senior year, typically students start approaching the research areas in or after their 2d year in graduate school. You could certainly give some very interesting classes overviewing what is going on in the research areas, but that is either additional classes or slows down the development of subject mastery.
There were several approaches to modernize the introductory curriculum in physics in the 60's - the Berkeley physics curriculium and the Fenyman lectures come to mind. The Fenyman lectures were and are excellent and some of the Berkeley books were excellent - but in retrospect both were instructional failures - experience showed that only the brightest students could handle them.
I attrited out of math for mathematicians in one semester - I was interested in using math, not doing math. I got a good grade, but I hated it. I still ended taking a LOT of math classes, but I was not interested in proofs for proofs sake. I have read comments from physics professors that they seem to be running a giant filter. I think the attrition rate when I was studying physics as an undergraduate was in excess of 95%.
I would note that being interested in a subject is necessary but not nearly sufficient. Some fields inherently require substantially above normal intelligence and may require other characteristics as well. My Junior mathematical physics text book noted that an understanding and facility with the math was necessary but not sufficient, as an understanding / intuition of the behavior of the physical systems being modeled was also necessary. Now working the problem sets and discussing solution approaches helped develop that understanding and intuition, but you absolutely had to have the necessary ability.
In the past few decades physics students have had mathematical assistance from dedicated algebraic manipulation software - Maple, Mathematica, ... This helps, but you still have to acquire an understanding of the subject matter, the tools, and the techniques to use the software effectively.
Further to this, I’d add the observation in a book I read by a mathematician - either Marcus Du Santoy or Eugenia Cheng - about the difference between those students who went on to become mathematicians vs maths teachers.
That there comes a point, for a mathematician, where you are more excited by the things not proven (the ABC conjecture, the Riemann hypothesis, Generalised Moonshine) than in solving equations.
The conjecture was that a lot of maths (and science) teachers are the people who did very well at the puzzle-solving of school level maths and want to get back there.
They aren’t much interested in their field post-1800.
Yes yes yes I think this is exactly right. People are motivated by many things -- some by a sense of belonging, yes, but many others by mystery and a challenge.
The structures of science publishing are nuts! Top journals are financed in ways that give huge profits to a handful of publishers at the expense of university libraries. The insanity you describe here is less discussed, but more directly harms students, so you'd think there'd be a greater sense of urgency.
My framework for understanding AI's impacts on education is that it puts a spotlight on problems that have long existed and have long been ignored. This is most visible to humanities teachers when it comes to writing instruction.
Perhaps my hopes for OER are misplaced. You mention it in passing, but isn't the answer here putting resources in the hands of the editors and writers doing the work of OER so they can afford to keep the materials up to date while undercutting the monopolies so that only the most corrupt systems and teachers are assigning their textbooks?
I kept thinking OER was the answer while I was working on this and kept looking for scholarship about OER content. I was shocked that it was *all* about cost and that the few things I found about content shrugged at outdatedness. I sent this around to some science education scholars and they all agreed (really quickly as if it were old news) that yeah yeah, textbooks are way out of date. I can't imagine this state of affairs for American history courses.
One thing I found -- and I will write about this next -- is how dense and hard to parse a great deal of scientific papers are. This is fine. But it is irksome how humanities scholars are pointed at for impenetrable writing when in fact we're no worse than scientists. This density is of course part of the problem in all fields.
Optimistically I think AI can help with this in its synthesizing capacity.
The translation of dense scholarship to a wider audience does seem to be something Substack is enabling. Many of my favorites are scholars doing just that. If microblogging creates a culture consisting of playing the dozens, microblogging creates a culture of....what I'm not sure yet, but it does seem to be creating communities of discourse around new ideas.
Turgid prose in academic papers is a real problem. If scholars wrote better they might feel more comfortable being public intellectuals and the public would be better informed about their field. There was a op ed in the NYT by Kristof who begged more professors to reach out to the general public , especially about political science! So this is something that any scholar can do to help the field from physics to history!
I agree, although there is more than bad or dense prose at the root of the problem. Incentives matter.
There are plenty of scientists and humanists writing well for general audiences, and presses (including academic presses) publishing their books. James Lang, who writes A General Education on Substack, has a wonderful new book called "Write Like You Teach" that helps develop those skills.
The problem is that those highly credentialed professors who succeed at reaching a general audience by writing trade books or on Substack lose status in the academy as mere popularizers.
That’s quite true . I just read a great book called The Ideas Industry by Daniel Drezner that has a quote from NYT op ed and he makes that point about losing status in your academic field when you engage in writing popular books.
I'm not sure there is a problem. Most science textbooks are introductory in nature and the basics of that haven't changed enough to warrant changing anything. The same is true with introductory math books, for example. Who cares about latest computational models when the basic framework is not understood. And there is a need to teach the history, at least briefly, of how we got to our present understanding of things - it gives students confidence that what we know now was not just dreamed up without evidence. Most science curricula is laid out this way even in college since the basics are often lacking in a high school education.
Claiming that because other fields, like social sciences which are not rooted in objective fact, change their opinions relatively frequently does not mean that hard sciences need to do the same. There is little (no?) value in introducing space-time model before, or instead of, Newtonian mechanics for those starting out. For example and although not a science book, Beer's introductory Statics and Mechanics textbook from my 1980 first year mechanical engineering class is just as valid today - not need to change just to follow the flavor of the month sort of thing.
Now if there are outright errors , and not just more in-depth nitpicking based on latest models, then you would have a point. But by the time a student gets to the more advanced topics they likely understand that "simpler" concepts need to be refined anyway, and are likely mature enough to know they weren't being lied to.
Agreed -- much stays the same, so why are the books (and digital versions) so expensive? There is no reason the core knowledge can't be delivered in one modality and the excitement of new discoveries delivered in another. The problem is the scaling up of delivery so that everyone is teaching the same thing all the time. When you're serving hundreds of thousands of students, the curious ones don't get to go off road to tackling advanced questions while most don't. The attrition rate is alarming. We can't afford that as a nation.
Hollis, is one implication of this and other writing you are doing on 'the last mile' that higher education in some ways ought to be much much smaller in terms of the number of students who pursue it? (with a corresponding expansion of more practical vocational options? And some major shifts to our economy to allow living wages?) I've toyed with the idea of, say, dispensing with a psychology 101 textbook in favor of a recent "Annual Review" volume - but to do that would require a different level of student preparation. OR, as you might suggest, it could be made more possible with AI tutoring for every student - but I don't trust the AI tutors to stay with the science, at least not at present. And, even if AI tutors could help students through challenging (and densely written) reading in theory, in fact, this might become a cliff notes educational approach?
Yes exactly! Why should anyone pay a university to deliver what is already known and freely available at scale without an expert guide (which is what is happening now). My prediction is that AI will deliver foundational knowledge while you, the faculty expert, will work with students on journeys launched from that foundation. If you start with an exciting journal article or new piece of research and students need to go back to learn foundational terms and concepts in order to understand it, might not that be better than starting with prep and then getting to the good stuff?
Introductory science courses focus on the fundamental concepts and ideas of the subject. The sciences are now mature disciplines, and the foundations are well-established and have been for some time. So there's not much urgency to "update" them.
For instance, consider biology. A typical introductory biology course at the college/university level focuses on three main core topics: evolution and ecology, human anatomy, and molecular biology. All of these topics have been deeply studied, and there haven't been any new discoveries at the **foundational** level for a long time. A high-quality genetics textbook from the 1990s would still be quite serviceable today, and it would not be hard to supplement it with additional materials for modern developments.
And that's true of all the physical sciences. Yes, people still teach mechanics and electrodynamics in introductory courses, because those are the foundations of all physics. Yes, the Bohr model is wrong, but it's instructive to understand why it's wrong, and pedagogically this is valuable in enabling students to come to grips with how quantum mechanics does and doesn't work. No, it's been hard to introduce computational methods into the curriculum, because programming is hard and there aren't a whole lot of worthwhile projects at the introductory level.
Like you say, scandals everywhere. One way of thinking about the way the academy has changed - not that it was ever that flash in these respects - is that its been transformed from an inefficient but effective institution to an efficient ineffective institution!
Put differently in emphasising competition, the private goods of academia were foregrounded with all those public goods (like peer review, publications, traditions of excellence and not p-hacking and so on) were pretty much ignored.
Constitutional Law textbooks in China are 220 years out of date. If you want to learn modern-science go to Military Secrets University rather than We Admit Everyone College
AP Science tests is a very good way to change the incentives here. The tests determine the textbooks and the classroom content, even for non-AP classes through the mechanism of imitation.
Old physcist turned engineer here. You aren't really going to understand the issues they are considering at the frontier before you understand and master the basics. And it takes a long time to learn the basics. Now I think that some of the fundamentals can be taught better using more modern techniques - the Gibbs/Heavyside formulation of electromagnetism is probably getter handled via a geometric calculus formulation - which also better prepares the student for dealing with spin issues in Quantum Mechanics, but you need to get the student familiar with a lot of areas and techniques before you can start handling the research issues. My experience is that some seminar classes for the best undergraduate students may be approaching such areas in their senior year, typically students start approaching the research areas in or after their 2d year in graduate school. You could certainly give some very interesting classes overviewing what is going on in the research areas, but that is either additional classes or slows down the development of subject mastery.
There were several approaches to modernize the introductory curriculum in physics in the 60's - the Berkeley physics curriculium and the Fenyman lectures come to mind. The Fenyman lectures were and are excellent and some of the Berkeley books were excellent - but in retrospect both were instructional failures - experience showed that only the brightest students could handle them.
I attrited out of math for mathematicians in one semester - I was interested in using math, not doing math. I got a good grade, but I hated it. I still ended taking a LOT of math classes, but I was not interested in proofs for proofs sake. I have read comments from physics professors that they seem to be running a giant filter. I think the attrition rate when I was studying physics as an undergraduate was in excess of 95%.
I would note that being interested in a subject is necessary but not nearly sufficient. Some fields inherently require substantially above normal intelligence and may require other characteristics as well. My Junior mathematical physics text book noted that an understanding and facility with the math was necessary but not sufficient, as an understanding / intuition of the behavior of the physical systems being modeled was also necessary. Now working the problem sets and discussing solution approaches helped develop that understanding and intuition, but you absolutely had to have the necessary ability.
In the past few decades physics students have had mathematical assistance from dedicated algebraic manipulation software - Maple, Mathematica, ... This helps, but you still have to acquire an understanding of the subject matter, the tools, and the techniques to use the software effectively.
Further to this, I’d add the observation in a book I read by a mathematician - either Marcus Du Santoy or Eugenia Cheng - about the difference between those students who went on to become mathematicians vs maths teachers.
That there comes a point, for a mathematician, where you are more excited by the things not proven (the ABC conjecture, the Riemann hypothesis, Generalised Moonshine) than in solving equations.
The conjecture was that a lot of maths (and science) teachers are the people who did very well at the puzzle-solving of school level maths and want to get back there.
They aren’t much interested in their field post-1800.
I suspect the same is true in the sciences
Yes yes yes I think this is exactly right. People are motivated by many things -- some by a sense of belonging, yes, but many others by mystery and a challenge.
The structures of science publishing are nuts! Top journals are financed in ways that give huge profits to a handful of publishers at the expense of university libraries. The insanity you describe here is less discussed, but more directly harms students, so you'd think there'd be a greater sense of urgency.
My framework for understanding AI's impacts on education is that it puts a spotlight on problems that have long existed and have long been ignored. This is most visible to humanities teachers when it comes to writing instruction.
Perhaps my hopes for OER are misplaced. You mention it in passing, but isn't the answer here putting resources in the hands of the editors and writers doing the work of OER so they can afford to keep the materials up to date while undercutting the monopolies so that only the most corrupt systems and teachers are assigning their textbooks?
I kept thinking OER was the answer while I was working on this and kept looking for scholarship about OER content. I was shocked that it was *all* about cost and that the few things I found about content shrugged at outdatedness. I sent this around to some science education scholars and they all agreed (really quickly as if it were old news) that yeah yeah, textbooks are way out of date. I can't imagine this state of affairs for American history courses.
One thing I found -- and I will write about this next -- is how dense and hard to parse a great deal of scientific papers are. This is fine. But it is irksome how humanities scholars are pointed at for impenetrable writing when in fact we're no worse than scientists. This density is of course part of the problem in all fields.
Optimistically I think AI can help with this in its synthesizing capacity.
The translation of dense scholarship to a wider audience does seem to be something Substack is enabling. Many of my favorites are scholars doing just that. If microblogging creates a culture consisting of playing the dozens, microblogging creates a culture of....what I'm not sure yet, but it does seem to be creating communities of discourse around new ideas.
Turgid prose in academic papers is a real problem. If scholars wrote better they might feel more comfortable being public intellectuals and the public would be better informed about their field. There was a op ed in the NYT by Kristof who begged more professors to reach out to the general public , especially about political science! So this is something that any scholar can do to help the field from physics to history!
I agree, although there is more than bad or dense prose at the root of the problem. Incentives matter.
There are plenty of scientists and humanists writing well for general audiences, and presses (including academic presses) publishing their books. James Lang, who writes A General Education on Substack, has a wonderful new book called "Write Like You Teach" that helps develop those skills.
The problem is that those highly credentialed professors who succeed at reaching a general audience by writing trade books or on Substack lose status in the academy as mere popularizers.
That’s quite true . I just read a great book called The Ideas Industry by Daniel Drezner that has a quote from NYT op ed and he makes that point about losing status in your academic field when you engage in writing popular books.
I'm not sure there is a problem. Most science textbooks are introductory in nature and the basics of that haven't changed enough to warrant changing anything. The same is true with introductory math books, for example. Who cares about latest computational models when the basic framework is not understood. And there is a need to teach the history, at least briefly, of how we got to our present understanding of things - it gives students confidence that what we know now was not just dreamed up without evidence. Most science curricula is laid out this way even in college since the basics are often lacking in a high school education.
Claiming that because other fields, like social sciences which are not rooted in objective fact, change their opinions relatively frequently does not mean that hard sciences need to do the same. There is little (no?) value in introducing space-time model before, or instead of, Newtonian mechanics for those starting out. For example and although not a science book, Beer's introductory Statics and Mechanics textbook from my 1980 first year mechanical engineering class is just as valid today - not need to change just to follow the flavor of the month sort of thing.
Now if there are outright errors , and not just more in-depth nitpicking based on latest models, then you would have a point. But by the time a student gets to the more advanced topics they likely understand that "simpler" concepts need to be refined anyway, and are likely mature enough to know they weren't being lied to.
Agreed -- much stays the same, so why are the books (and digital versions) so expensive? There is no reason the core knowledge can't be delivered in one modality and the excitement of new discoveries delivered in another. The problem is the scaling up of delivery so that everyone is teaching the same thing all the time. When you're serving hundreds of thousands of students, the curious ones don't get to go off road to tackling advanced questions while most don't. The attrition rate is alarming. We can't afford that as a nation.
Hollis, is one implication of this and other writing you are doing on 'the last mile' that higher education in some ways ought to be much much smaller in terms of the number of students who pursue it? (with a corresponding expansion of more practical vocational options? And some major shifts to our economy to allow living wages?) I've toyed with the idea of, say, dispensing with a psychology 101 textbook in favor of a recent "Annual Review" volume - but to do that would require a different level of student preparation. OR, as you might suggest, it could be made more possible with AI tutoring for every student - but I don't trust the AI tutors to stay with the science, at least not at present. And, even if AI tutors could help students through challenging (and densely written) reading in theory, in fact, this might become a cliff notes educational approach?
Yes exactly! Why should anyone pay a university to deliver what is already known and freely available at scale without an expert guide (which is what is happening now). My prediction is that AI will deliver foundational knowledge while you, the faculty expert, will work with students on journeys launched from that foundation. If you start with an exciting journal article or new piece of research and students need to go back to learn foundational terms and concepts in order to understand it, might not that be better than starting with prep and then getting to the good stuff?
Introductory science courses focus on the fundamental concepts and ideas of the subject. The sciences are now mature disciplines, and the foundations are well-established and have been for some time. So there's not much urgency to "update" them.
For instance, consider biology. A typical introductory biology course at the college/university level focuses on three main core topics: evolution and ecology, human anatomy, and molecular biology. All of these topics have been deeply studied, and there haven't been any new discoveries at the **foundational** level for a long time. A high-quality genetics textbook from the 1990s would still be quite serviceable today, and it would not be hard to supplement it with additional materials for modern developments.
And that's true of all the physical sciences. Yes, people still teach mechanics and electrodynamics in introductory courses, because those are the foundations of all physics. Yes, the Bohr model is wrong, but it's instructive to understand why it's wrong, and pedagogically this is valuable in enabling students to come to grips with how quantum mechanics does and doesn't work. No, it's been hard to introduce computational methods into the curriculum, because programming is hard and there aren't a whole lot of worthwhile projects at the introductory level.
Thanks Hollis. You make some excellent points.
Like you say, scandals everywhere. One way of thinking about the way the academy has changed - not that it was ever that flash in these respects - is that its been transformed from an inefficient but effective institution to an efficient ineffective institution!
Put differently in emphasising competition, the private goods of academia were foregrounded with all those public goods (like peer review, publications, traditions of excellence and not p-hacking and so on) were pretty much ignored.
https://www.themandarin.com.au/120036-academia-from-inefficient-effectiveness-to-efficient-ineffectiveness/
Constitutional Law textbooks in China are 220 years out of date. If you want to learn modern-science go to Military Secrets University rather than We Admit Everyone College
AP Science tests is a very good way to change the incentives here. The tests determine the textbooks and the classroom content, even for non-AP classes through the mechanism of imitation.
https://veejaytsunamix.substack.com/p/the-planetary-computer-handbook-free try it, it's free, loads about education treated in there...