Word: idea
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...science is too much for secondary education, and that only the college can handle it. Not many colleges are interested or capable, of course, but even those that try do not succeed very well. They have to contend with two sorts of prejudices built up in high schools--the idea that math and science are either much too difficult or much too boring for the ordinary, healthy student, or the other snobbery that regards any history course at all as an imposition on the time of the budding engineer. The best General Education program imaginable could not overcome these handicaps...
...Walden, a radically new curriculum has been developed, a plan so exciting within the school that there is again the idea of doing something revolutionary in education...
...ninth grade, the first topic considered is the formation of the earth, and various concepts, like those of LaPlace and Jeans, are dealt with. While the subject is not exhausted, the general idea is left of a mass of gas contracting to form the solar system...
Astronomy receives the most attention in the eighth grade. Basic scientific concepts of space and time are presented, and the student's idea of time as something on a wristwatch is shaken when the teacher forces him to examine what he actually means by a "year." He begins to think how the ancients measured, with only rough instruments, the recurrence of the solstice, and how they had to repeat this many times to average and fix the duration of the year. By December the students are able to measure the solstice within a few days, and they understand their instruments...
They do not spend all their time on this program, of course. In the eighth grade it takes twelve fifty minute periods per week. Meanwhile the Walden students are taking a general language course which brings them the basic ideas of languages, speech, formation, cognate patterns, etc., a basic American history course including a study of current events, and an English course. Furthermore, within the science course, attention is drawn to the implications of science for society. For example, in the study of the development of the ancient idea of the year, it is shown that a stable society...