Why do I say it’s not about “acquiring subject matter knowledge?” It is conventional wisdom among teachers that, “by August, they’ve forgotten most of what they learned.” One can question whether the word “learn” is used correctly but it is undeniable that if students had to retake all their tests a year later, they would score much, much lower.

This fact is the elephant in the room. Most everyone in the business knows it’s true but just about everybody avoids thinking about it.

Things like the National Assessment of Educational Progress show astounding ignorance among students. Many states now have subject matter tests that students must pass to graduate. Take a look at the tests and the passing scores and be amazed at how easy they should be to pass. Then consider the fact that a large percentage of students fail and that many schools have extensive “review” before the tests. The amount of “subject matter knowledge acquisition” is pretty low.

Parents think their children are acquiring large amounts of knowledge. They are mostly wrong. Some kids do. But mostly not.

And often parents have an ambivalent attitude. “I’ve never had to use the quadratic formula since tenth grade algebra. Why should my kid have to know it to pass the high school graduation exam?” What parents want their kids to have is knowledge that will be useful, that will make their children “successful,” which generally translates to “give them a wide choice of ways to make a living that are interesting and well-paying.” They don’t know what that knowledge is and neither do schools.

So what do schools do? They screen. People who do well in school are people who can defer gratification, work toward a goal, see a task through to completion, etc. If high school was about “acquisition of subject matter knowledge,” GEDs would be worth more than a high school diploma, because GEDs certify that a person has demonstrated recently that he or she can correctly answer questions about all the major things that are supposed to be learned in high school. But GEDs are worth less. They show that the recipient couldn’t make it through the normal high school process, would probably be a risky choice to offer a job to.

Of course, since screening is largely a ranking process, there is a constant push for credential inflation. Employers who once required a high school diploma now require a college diploma for the same job. Jobs that used to require a college diploma now require an MBA. Not because the jobs are really more difficult but because the old cut-off no longer cuts off enough people; the old diploma requirement no longer ensures that you are getting the “top” people.

Wow. Everyone has differing opinions about school, but our visions of schooling simply have zero overlap. For me, it’s about education.

And I disagree with you that this is a minority opinion among parents, and that for most people, schooling is not about acquiring subject matter knowledge. Try selling this theory to parents looking for a private school. No sale.

Personally, I want my kids to get their socialization in the family and on the streets and workplace. Creds? God bless the SAT and AP. I seriously shudder to think of my children going to school for the express purpose of credentials or socialization. That bar is so low I can’t limbo under it.

We certainly could prove that most remembered very little of it. Unfortunately, we could also prove that about almost any high school (or college) course.

I’m not exactly sure what that means. Certainly, for most people, schooling is not about acquiring subject matter knowledge. It is about screening, credentialing, socializing, staying off the streets, learning to “play well with others.”

Fair enough.

I just don’t think high school phyiscs is important. Why? For 99% of the kids who won’t take it again in college, it’s a waste of their valuable time. In one ear and out the other. I would bet some serious cash that if we tested students who took high school physics only once ten years ago, we could prove it’s a waste of time and money. In other words, if high school physics was a product for sale on the free market, I don’t think many would buy. Especially at current rates, which would be about $1600 per year ($10k per year for six high school classes).

As for the students who will take it in college, I just think that learning stuff in the right order is better. Much of non-calculus physics has to be dumbed-down, and thus must be relearned later using new methods, and this is very confusing, not to mention inefficient.

Alas, the proportion of students who graduate high school with anything near a mastery of math is infinitesimal. No doubt this proportion could be increased by telling the best students, “You’re going to have to double up on math before you can take physics.”

The few, the proud, the dedicated would then be allowed to take physics in 12th grade. No one else could touch it until they had shown math mastery in college. Which would mean very few people. Period.

I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

Sure. I absolutely agree. I merely think it’s a waste of the student’s time that would be so much better spent learning calculus.

IOW, if we take two identical high school students, one focusing on a complete mastery of mathematics while the other the plays at learning physics, I think any university prof can tell you who will come out on top when they go head-to-head in advanced physics, or even on the physics AP exam.

I don’t think Americans have any idea what’s coming down the educational turnpike in science. As the world flattens, we will be facing the very top IQ set chosen from a pool of 2 billion Chinese and Indians. Our population of 0.3 billion is a rounding error for them. I promise you, the top rung of these kids (the ones who get to come here) know their math like our kids know their sitcoms. I’ve spoken with science department heads who say they wouldn’t accept any American graduate students if it was strictly merit based. We simply need to raise the bar, if only to prepare our brightest high school students who are used to sitting on top of the curve for the competition they will be facing. This means serious math in high school, and physics can certainly wait for it.

You may well be right that for some high school physics courses, “Fun, sure, but nothing worthwhile is gained.” It is easy to run a high school physics course so that it is little more than labs and memorization–and the memorization doesn’t last past June. Of course, that latter is true of many courses.

But it certainly is possible to learn a good deal of physics without calculus. Anyone who actually understands Paul Hewitt’s Conceptual Physics book is ahead of 95–no, probably 99–per cent of the country’s college graduates.

And algebra is a powerful tool. One of the things I (yes, a high school physics teacher) do early on is have my students make a graph of velocity against time in a simple situation like, “Joe drives for 2 hours at 60 miles per hour.” They get a nice rectangle and they know that the area of a rectangle is length times width. So I have them calculate it. And they’re kind of flumoxed that the answer they get is 120 miles. Every other area problem they’ve done gives them a unit of some length squared.

I tell them they have done something wonderful. The unit is right. By finding the area between the velocity line and the time axis, they have found the distance that Joe goes in that period of time. We then do somewhat more complicated “trips” and it all works. I often end with a plug for calculus. With the math we have, we can’t do really complicated trips, but you can with calculus

There are lots of things that are easier to “do” with calculus but you often don’t need calculus to understand the idea. For someone fluent in calculus, it is meaningful to say that momentum is the time integral of force. But with the right build-up and examples, it is meaningful to the less fluent to say that “momentum is accumulated force.”

Which nicely leads to the idea that additional force is required to change momentum (harkening back to Newton’s Second Law) and that the amount of momentum change will depend on how much force is exerted and for how long (the impulse-momentum theorem).

When we did have AP classes, all students could sign up, and many did because they got extra grade points, but all students did not do well. And, as someone has already mentioned, the teacher had to dumb down the curriculum to make it work for the less successful student.