International Commission on Physics Education

3. How international?

It is a cosy truism that science is international, but this statement needs to be examined. What it means, of course, is that a scientific experiment, properly conducted, yields the same result (within the margins of error) wherever it is done, that the criteria of scientific belief are universal, and that the language of science knows no national boundaries. But the practice of science, and especially of physics, has never been truly international — least of all today for the simple reason that research at the frontiers calls upon technical resources that may be lacking in all but a few countries.

Looking at education in science, and in physics in particular, one can argue that it is both more and less international than pioneering research. It is more international in the sense that every civilized country has science as an essential component of its educational programmes, and a country without particle accelerators can still teach physics, even to a high level. On the other hand, an educational system is part of the social fabric of a country, and the way in which science is taught may be shaped or constrained by local conditions and resources.

This difference between physics research and physics education has, I believe, an important influence on the role of the International Commission, and on what it can hope to achieve.

On the positive side, there is no doubt that teachers in different countries have much to learn from one another. It is emphatically not a one way street in which poorer countries pick up what they can from the richer. An ingenious pedagogic idea may, indeed, have a greater likelihood of being born in a place where material resources are limited. More importantly, however, teachers of physics in all countries share the same concerns and purposes, and stand to benefit by getting together to discuss how they operate. The Commission, therefore, has consistently sought to make participation in its activities as broadly international as possible. Its greatest success to date has been the Edinburgh conference in 1975, at which about 75 different countries were represented.

On the negative side, it must be admitted that physics education is a poor relation, a Cinderella, compared to most of the research fields represented in IUPAP. The Edinburgh conference just mentioned was by far the largest conference held under the Commission's auspices, yet it had fewer than 350 participants, whereas some of the research speciality conferences are up in the thousands. Of course size in itself is not a virtue, and may even be a drawback—in any case it affects the whole style and character of a conference—but it is ironic that physics education, which involves vastly more practitioners (by one or two orders of magnitude) than individual research fields, operates on a quite small scale when it comes to international meetings. (It may be worth pointing out, in this connection, that the membership of the American Association of Physics Teachers alone is about 10,000.) The limiting factor – a very grave one – appears to be the lack of funds available to enable teachers of physics to attend international meetings. The problem is severe for university or college teachers, and almost prohibitive for secondary-school teachers, yet most of those who do manage to attend such meetings would, I believe, attest to their great value as a forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences.

Although the Commission can claim some success in making its activities genuinely international, the picture is by no means fully satisfactory. To take a specific instance, the total attendance at the Edinburgh conference in 1975 was about 330 registered participants spread over 73 countries. However, when examined in close detail, the distribution was astonishingly non uniform. This is shown in the table and in the map. For convenience, the world has been divided here into ten main regions, as listed in the table. The number of participants averaged about one per 10 million of world population, but at one extreme was the Orient (primarily China and Japan) with only 5 participants from about 1000 million population (i.e., about one per 200 million) and at the other was Western Europe, with 165 participants from 370 million (i.e., about one in 2 million). Also very noteworthy, and regrettable, was the contrast between Western and Eastern Europe (including the U.S.S.R.) a factor of more than ten difference in the numbers of participants for essentially equal total populations. Of course, it is to be expected that the host country for a conference will be disproportionately represented, but this goes only a small way towards accounting for the big East-West difference just referred to. At an earlier conference, held in Hungary in 1970 the representation from Western Europe was 70% of that from Eastern Europe. Thus, much remains to be done if the scope of the Commission's activities is to be truly representative of the world's many different educational systems. The outstanding omission — which recent political developments may help to repair — has been any involvement at all from the People's Republic of China.

4. The Commission - sponsored conferences
4.1. The first conference (Paris, 1960) (Brown and Clarke 1960, Sears 1961).

This conference, from which all the Commission activities developed, was conceived by Professor Sanborn C. Brown, who subsequently became the first chairman of the Commission, and by Dr. W. C. Kelly, who was elected chairman in 1972. The opening address was by Professor Yves Rocard, who expressed the hope "that we shall arrive at a definition of an international teacher of physics, who should be a generator of fruitful exchanges, and who should contribute to breaking down the potential barriers of out of date nationalism between our countries, in a century in which the great enterprises of science call for universal collaboration."

The main themes of that conference have proved to be recurring ones: Physics as part of a general education; Examinations and the selection of students; Curricula; Laboratory; Physics for other sciences and engineering; Training for teaching and for research; Films and television as teaching aids. In the nature of things, much time was devoted to comparing and contrasting the educational systems in different countries. One participant (Dr. M. Santur of Turkey) expressed himself eloquently on the Two Cultures theme:

"Physics as a method and philosophy does not have a very great impact on the way of thinking of the majority of cultured men at the present time. A man of culture takes pride in his knowledge of letters, philosophy, and fine arts; he can quote from Cicero and Aristophanes, he can discourse on the subconscious and knows the difference between abstract and impressionist painting, but he easily confesses that he never understood physics . . . He considers it a dry subject, a mere craft, which, to be sure, yields some profitable results but which should be left to the appropriate craftsman. If physics as a way of thinking is to take its rightful place along with other humanities, and if it is to influence the attitude of mind of large masses, a great effort has to be made..."

I am tempted to suggest, pessimistically, that the only significant change in that picture, twenty years later, is that the level of general culture on the purely humanistic side has fallen, without any compensating gains for science. Certainly, physics as part of every man's (and woman's) education remains a distant dream— but at least some vigorous attention is now being devoted to it. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, however, it presents vastly more difficult problems than the training of our own kind, and the time scale for any significant impact is undoubtedly long.

Besides its proposal for the creation of the International Commission on Physics Education, the conference in its final resolutions recommended a major improvement in the degree of professionalism and the working conditions of physics teachers, and a closer relationship between universities and secondary schools in the area of physics education.

4.2. Conference on Physics in General Education (Rio de Janeiro, 1963) (Brown et al. 1964)

This conference took its theme from the first of the resolutions passed at the Paris conference, which began: "In our view, physics is an essential part of the intellectual life of man at the present day." Its stated area of concern was the broad training given to all children up to about the age of sixteen. The conference had 149 participants from 29 different countries.

The conference recognized that, at the general educational level, physics could not be fully separated from other facets of that education, even though it needed to be taught as a subject in its own right. The holding of the conference in Brazil, a technically underdeveloped country, helped to concentrate attention on science as a component of a general education, but, within this framework, as the chief key to progress for developing nations.

In keeping with this broad theme, although there was some discussion of particular courses, especially the American PSSC programme and the British Nuffield project, the main emphasis was on exploring the status of physics as part of our culture, and on how teachers and students alike could be given an adequately broad view of its role.

Gerald Holton contrasted the narrow and sequential pattern of a traditional physics course with the possibilities of a course having numerous connections to other sciences and to other areas of intellectual and cultural endeavour. Eric Rogers advocated a programme that stayed within the bounds of physics but broke through the artificial partitions between different areas of the subject, and that had as its conscious aim the basic understanding of physics, rather than the acquisition of numerous formal results and unrelated facts. These influential educators have, of course, embodied their ideas in works which, like PSSC and Nuffield Physics, have become deservedly famous (Harvard Project Physics and Physics for the Inquiring Mind).

There was agreement amongst the participants that physics should be introduced at an early stage in all educational systems, but that existing courses usually fell far short of presenting the subject in such a way as to do justice to its importance and its achievements. Ways of improving the situation, through better curricula and more enlightened methods of teacher training, were discussed.

4.3. Conference on Education of Professional Physicists (London, 1965) (Brown and Clarke 1966)

This conference had a much sharper focus than either of the first two, and was felt to be correspondingly more successful. It had 93 participants from 26 different countries.

In his opening address Lord Beeching (of Imperial Chemical Industries, and formerly Chairman of the British Transport Commission) argued strongly that university training, at least in Britain, took insufficient account of the fact that most of its physics graduates were destined to work outside academia, and often in jobs not making direct use of physics. In consequence physicists are not as prominent as they should be in top management, administration and politics, where their scientific training would often make them more effective than the arts graduates who traditionally occupy such positions. He quoted an earlier remark of his on this theme: "To my mind it is highly desirable that physics should be regarded much less than it is at present as a form of vocational training and much more as a part of general education for life in a technological world." He suggested that perhaps the research and the teaching roles of physics departments ought to be made somewhat separate, with perhaps some shift of emphasis from the former to the latter.

Not surprisingly, Lord Beeching's remarks elicited a fair amount of discussion. The interface between the universities and industry was the subject of full length papers by Mr. G. Bosworth (English Electric Co.) and Dr. H. G. B. Casimir (Philips Eindhoven).). Casimir emphasized the value to industry of getting graduates who were strong in fundamental knowledge and capable of frontier research. With characteristic wit he remarked,

"From the point of the company manager it is clear that the research laboratory and the physicists must serve his purposes, which is often expressed symbolically by saying that the physicist must help him to earn money. I say this is a symbolic expression because, to my mind, whereas physicists deal with concrete things like electrons and atoms and electromagnetic fields and wave functions, business men deal with abstractions like money. That it is an abstraction is quite clear because, whereas most physicists will agree on the definition, of an electron or atom, no two economists will agree on the definition of money!"

He asserted the possibility of "an honourable compromise" in which a physicist pursues work of value and importance to himself while at the same time contributing to the well being of the company that employs him. The involvement of university professors as consultants in industry was also, in his view, an important two–way connection with educational implications.

Most of the other sessions of the conference were based on descriptive accounts of university physics teaching programmes in different countries Belgium, Britain, The Netherlands, South Africa, U.S.A., and U.S.S.R. The existence of widely different traditions was apparent, with massive formal training in the U.S.S.R. at one extreme, and some approximation to physics as part of a general cultural education in a number of four year colleges in the U.S.A. Special Sessions were held on laboratory work and on the use of films and television, including the use of television to reach students outside the universities.

4.4. Seminar on the Education of Physicists for Work in Industry (Eindhoven, 1968) (Diemer and Emck 1969)

This international seminar brought together 60 participants from 19 countries. There was an essentially equal mix of industrial and academic representatives.

The seminar had been preceded by several months of selection and study of relevant literature and reports. Building on this, the seminar itself was structured into five working groups, concerned with the following topics: ( 1 ) Circumstances and requirements of industry; (2) Possibilities for improvement in university preparation for industrial careers; (3) Specialist versus generalist education; (4) Cooperation between university and industry; (5) Extramural education.

The editors of the Proceedings commented that "a common denominator of the whole seminar was undoubtedly the main emphasis on mental attitudes, general abilities and methodology both in the physicist's education and in his professional career, and not on specific knowledge and specialist curriculum content." It was felt that a central problem was that students in general are very poorly informed on the diverse careers open to physicists in industry, and let themselves be put off by such pejorative catch phrases as 'rat race' and 'cog in the machine.' Universities can and should undertake a major role in remedying this situation. It was felt that the possibilities of mutually beneficial cooperation between industries and universities, combining their different kinds of strengths, were very great but in general were being inadequately exploited. The importance of making refresher courses and supplementary education available to physicists in industry was strongly urged. Another point, seldom given much attention in the academic training of physicists, was the enormous importance of effective expression and communication, especially technical writing, for physicists in industry, whether they stay in research or go into management.