Word: holton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...seek satisfaction outside the Harvard community. Certainly more prestige (and often more money) is attached to advising leaders in government and industry or to chairing a section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science than to teaching a first-rate course to Harvard undergraduates. "In physics," Gerald Holton says, "many of us spend an average of one or two days a month out of the country, not to mention the time spent outside of Cambridge. The center of gravity of faculty loyalty is shifting away from Harvard Square to wherever one's professional concerns may lead...
...alternative to the topical approach is a foundation course, an extensive introduction to a whole field. Such a course guarantees the legitimate generality which the Bruner Committee and the Redbook desired, and avoids the arbitrary choice to topics which Holton feared, although it need not supply the perspective all three desired. This solution turns the course into an introduction to the field, thus a departmental course. (For concreteness, Nat Sci 4 and Nat Sci 5 may be considered the most successful examples of the topical and survey approaches, respectively...
...generalizations and theories, extending first-hand experience with theoretical calculations from introductory laboratories; third, the social context of science, starting from knowledge of at least one scientist in one real laboratory in one real department. It is these courses that would perform the "orienting" function of scientific education with Holton emphasizes. In order to make the introductory courses now called Nat Scis available through the departments, and in order to leave the field of Gen Ed open to topical courses which treat these three issues, the departmental courses currently disguised as Nat Sci should shed their false labels...
...present, there are probably only two courses which qualify as this kind of science Gen Ed: Nash's Nat Sci 4, which presumes a high school background in science, and Holton's Nat Sci 120 (not given this year), which presumes Physics...
...Doty Committee might consider requiring, in addition to one introductory science course, mathematical proficiency equivalent to that provided by, say, Math. 1. The Redbook and Holton emphasized how useful, and often how essential, mathematics is for a direct approach to scientific problems; scientific literacy without the concepts of function, rate of change, and limit, and what these mean in operation, is subtile indeed...