How to not teach physics

No one learns physics from being taught physics. Therefore, the best way to teach physics is to not teach physics.

It took me twenty years of teaching university physics to finally learn this about teaching physics.

I would kill myself trying to explain the concepts, patiently and step by step, repeating and re-casting, and on and on. I would grasp any sign as a proof that my efforts were being rewarded. I would read books about teaching and about interesting demonstrations, and go through all the stages of improving my method.

But, in the end, there was a final exam, which I had painstakingly tried to make as clear and as graded in difficulty as possible, to allow all to answer to some degree. And then I would look at the examination papers for hours, for days, for weeks, looking for evidence that someone had understood something or could communicate some idea that showed something about physics...

Or even just show me that they had understood my question. I told my students that if they could explain the question, explain what it was about, something about the conceptual context, then they would pass.

And, well, year after year, I found that no one learned anything from my courses. The few exceptions who did well on the final examination would have done equally well, in terms of understanding and reasoning, on the first day of class, and learned what they learned from engaging on their own terms with the subject, not from my classroom presentations and antics.

And half-way through I found that there was a whole research area called "physics education research" (PER) which proved that the students really do not learn anything, no matter what traditional methods are used. And the PER researchers tried to refine methods that were expected to work better. So I tried several of these. But I found that there were no improved results, not really.

I still had a sense that students were not getting it, not understanding the concepts, and not caring about the ideas. Even if I trained them to describe the concepts with proper words and alerted them to the importance of understanding the concepts, still nothing. Even if they got better at answering multiple-choice problems, still nothing really. Even if they could do the math to get good answers by practicing a lot with similar problems. Most who could, could do all this without ever really learning anything.

I mean, how many students sit down and figure things out? And which method catalyses such behaviour? How does reasoning develop in a life of artificial stimuli?

So I thought: "They don't learn from being taught. That's the mega-lie. So let me try not teaching. I mean really not teaching. Go in the other direction to let the learning do the walking..."

It's frightening when you first think of it because you might not know all the material you are not going to teach. You can't even predict what material you don't know that you are going to have to not teach. Frightening.

But I was so tired of living the lie that I decided to swallow my fear and boldly move forward. And this is what I did in my introductory university physics course, winter 2007. Little did I know, it was going to be the last time I would be allowed the privilege of "teaching" first-year physics students.

I told the students to close their books and not read them, unless they thought they might find something of interest in there that they wanted to know. I told them they could look anywhere they wanted and ask anyone questions to find what they wanted.

I told them that first we needed to figure out what was worth knowing, and what it means to know.

I got blank stares. They worried about how they would be graded in such a system. They wondered what I really meant and what did I want them to do. But they gave me a chance and, luckily, I didn't know what I was doing, so it was quite authentic.

So I said: "Let's see. There must be every day things that we want to know, that we can understand...? Things we are curious about?"

They couldn't find any. Some of them said they had a lot of work to do in their other classes so they did not want me to be too demanding. Many shared that view. But as the conversation continued and as it became clear that, well, it was a conversation; they relaxed. But they still could not think of anything they wanted to know, beyond the latest homework in the other courses. Sad really.

So I said: "Why is the sky blue?" "No really, how does that work?"

Well many of them had heard something about that in high school so we started a class-wide discussion about how and why the sky is blue. And for every answer that did not quite work, we were able to find a flaw in the answer, or a dead-end, where the word answer was not really explaining anything beyond "something something".

I told them that it maybe had something to do with why the evening sky can be red and also asked why clouds are white, when they are not red.

So this led us to what is light...? Now you can spend a lot of focused time asking yourself what light is if you want to know why the sky is blue. So I discovered... I helped them see, through questions, what it was to truly know or understand something versus just repeat the words...  that they could search and explore and critique themselves. So they did.

To achieve this, however, I needed to boldly risk humiliating or challenging or teasing or pushing each one of them, at various times, with a "Really?" "How do you explain that?" "Does that make sense to you?" And others would come to the rescue with "He means this I think..." or "No, that can't be because...".

And they could see that I really enjoyed the conversation and that, well, I was a good person even though I was frightening, in a good way. So we developed a relationship in physical phenomena. And well things just took off. There were almost fifty of them. They researched on their own and brought new ideas back to class.

We moved from topic to topic and never really finished anything. A very difficult one was "Why is it cold on mountain tops?" That question is rich with possibilities. I mean rich. And, is it hot in a deep mine shaft?

We learned about molecules, electromagnetic waves, perception, ... always coming back to things we wanted to know. And we kept explaining it to each other to test if we really understood. And we did simple calculations to see if it made sense. And, well, if you pardon the expression: No child was left behind!

The teacher assistant (TA) was asked to fully participate and observe the classroom dynamics and individual reactions, rather than do mindless grading of cookie cutter assignments. She was fascinated by the positive student reaction to the experiment and left physics soon after to do education, something she already loved.

The students were bringing their friends into class and telling their parents in glowing terms about the physics course.

And we had a final examination. And, honestly, it was like no final examination I had ever seen before. It was the opposite of depressing and fun to grade. It was full of intelligence and independent thought and evidence of significant research. I had a sense that the students had understood things, could explain them, and owned their knowledge.

I went back to the previous year's examinations and saw a huge difference. I lent the two piles of examinations to the TA and she concurred that, yes, there was a significant qualitative improvement that could not be denied.

Now know that I was not comparing "bad" teaching to "anything would be better than that". I was considered one of the best traditional method teachers, by the usual standards. So I was comparing certified bad teaching to something much better.

That was the only year that I felt I had done a good job in first-year physics. And they never let me teach introductory physics again, after twenty years. As soon as I figured out how to make it work, they deprived me of practicing my hard-earned trade. And I was fired from my tenured full professorship two years later, under the false pretext of fraudulent grading in one advanced physics course (LINK)(LINK). The latter was a separate course at the fourth-year and graduate levels, given in 2008 using the same kind of pedagogical method, and the circumstances of the institution's reaction are described in this 2008 TV-Ontario video interview: HERE.

I found out several years later that the chairman of physics wrote to the dean of science that he had heard I was doing something unusual in my 2007 first-year course and that the dean should probably know about it. They never asked me about it or brought it up during that magical year of not teaching first-year physics.

I would have been pleased to tell them about my discovery: Avoid all teaching. Class time is too precious to waste on such a numbing activity.

Other essays by Denis Rancourt are here: LINK.

The web site to Rancourt's new book "Hierarchy and free expression in the fight against racism" is here: LINK.

Are Physicists Smart?

Disciplined professionals serve power

by Denis G. Rancourt

First published on Global Research in 2006, presently not available on the GR site.


It is generally assumed that physicists are smart people. Even some chemists look up to physicists. Physics is reputed to be a difficult subject, the stuff of nightmares in high school. The greatest scientists that come to mind are often the physicists Einstein and Newton. The inventors of the atomic bomb are held in awe, as are the cosmologists that gave us black holes and worm holes into parallel universes. The proverbial rocket scientists are physicists. It is generally assumed that anyone who has studied quantum mechanics and can work-in the concept of entropy at a cocktail party is pretty smart.

I’m a physicist and I’ve trained physicists and I’d like to advance a different view: That generally, physicists, as a group, are pretty stupid, and certainly no smarter than any other group of self-centered and self-serving professionals.

Physicists limit themselves to physics, to simple phenomena that are amenable to manageable mathematical descriptions or to more complex phenomena that are reduced to simplistic descriptions via appropriate filters that are said to “capture the essential features”. Physicists study only what they can, given their specific and limited methods, possibly more so than in any other natural science discipline.

This in itself is an efficient and productive approach but physicists go much further. As a matter of professional culture, physicists believe that their methods could eventually lead to a deep and thorough understanding of all phenomena (including human consciousness, learning, politics, etc., for example), given time, dedication, sufficient funding, and powerful enough computers. Physicists believe that all sciences and all branches of human knowledge are physics, ultimately. They arrive at this conclusion having never read or studied psychology, pedagogy, philosophy, history, politics, sociology, art, etc. as part of their professional training.

Indeed, the modern professional physicist has usually subjected himself (less often herself) to extreme specialization, to be able to handle the technical side of the profession. This training is also largely about adopting the culture of the professional physicist: Examples and examples of what are “good problems – good questions” and what are “bad (= ‘unmanageable’) problems”; and examples and examples of how one tames a new problem and fits it into the mould of what a physicist can do. The physics student learns to bridle his curiosity and to restrict himself to what is doable, publishable, useful, profitable; using the unique methods of physics and providing “answers” that other professionals could not. That is the name of the game.

A broader education would not be compatible with this strategy – just enough reading outside of the field to spot new physics opportunities is the most that is recommended. A broader education might also cloud one’s professional identity and one’s professionalism: Eighty percent of physicists in North America work for the military, in the world’s largest military economy [1]. But of course physics students are drawn to physics because all can be understood via the physics portal and because worm holes are neat. Students search for meaning and social status and find military and corporate service, often in an environment that maintains the neat-problem mental bubble first cultivated in sci-fi and electronic game land.

If you’re already smarter than everyone else (as is generally the working assumption in most professions), then you don’t really need to venture out into other fields – that are so primitive and qualitative and descriptive in comparison to physics.

Other fields…? Other methods…? Complexity…? Professional physicists have so buried themselves into their culture of the doable, the mappable, the reducible, the solvable, the codable, … that they are largely unable to perceive complexity.

Students are drawn to physics by its promise of a manageable mathematical description, an objective method to own the world, to organise and predict the outside. Emotional immaturity, a need for an objective solution to uncertainty or a need to escape reality, draws students to physics and accompanies them in their professional development. The same naivety that couples so well with the physics culture also blocks perception of the complex.

That is the main reason, in my view, that physicists are stupid: They are unable to perceive complexity, a complexity of the real world that goes far beyond what physics will ever be able to handle in any universe. They are unable to even get a glimpse of the textures and subplots that may be intrinsically incompatible with mathematical description. To them, mathematics is the language of reality, not a mere human invention or genetically delimited expression. To them, the objective mind is all-powerful and able to open all doors. To them, useful perception is physiological and does not benefit from the uncertainties of one’s emotional state. To the physicist, communication is data transmission, not the subtleties that can only be captured by the right configuration of social and emotional attributes. The physicist deals in hard bits, not the imperceptibles that determine our animal and social lives. The physicist is unaware of his blindness and glibly confident in his perception, especially his perception of himself as systematic unraveller of the truth.

If at least he was harmless!

Notes:
[1] Schmidt, Jeff. Disciplined Minds. Rowan and Littlefield Publ., NY, 2000; Parenti, Michael. Democracy for the Few. Bedford St. Martin’s Publ., Boston, 1995; Mitchell, Peter R. and Schoeffel, John (Eds.) Understanding Power – The Indispensable Chomsky. The New Press, NY, 2002.

Canadian Education as an Impetus towards Fascism

by Denis G. Rancourt
December 2009

[This article was first published in the 2009 vol.1 issue.2 of JASTE (Journal for Activist Science & Technology Education) pages 68-77.]

Summary – I review my more than 40 years experience with the educational system in (Ontario) Canada, from my days as student to my 2009 dismissal as a tenured physics professor at the University of Ottawa, and conclude that a transformation of the student persona has accompanied the imposed system reforms and that this persona reflects real psychological change towards an increased inability for independent thought and an inability to discern one’s own learning. I argue that both the system reforms and the individual transformations of students are consistent with a pattern towards fascism occurring in a global disruptive and predatory economic hierarchy during rising economic power-coalescence. The nature of my political dismissal for attempting to resist the reforms – including an abrupt laboratory lockout, intimidations and firing of graduate students and a junior researcher, forceful police arrests of students and of a professor for participating in a public campus event, disregarding due process, and the recently proven hiring of a journalism student as “agent of University Legal Counsel” to perform extensive covert surveillance (from 2006 to 2008) – is also an indicator of emergent fascism.



I am 52 years old. I did high school and university, two graduate degrees, have a Ph.D., and two years of post-doctoral studies in leading scientific laboratories. I was tenured and a physics university professor for 23 years, during which I taught over 2000 students at all levels, until they fired me in 2009. [1] One of Canada’s most decorated scientists has said that I am one of Canada’s top research scientists. [2] I want to talk about my experience as a teacher.

Observing the Canadian (Ontario) educational system from the inside, both as a student and as a teacher and also as a researcher of education, I witnessed a dramatic transformation of the student persona (over the span of approximately 30 years.) I infer a deep transformation in the young person’s psychology.

***

FREEDOM BREEDS INDEPENDENCE. I remember grade-eight; the whole class being left the entire afternoon to figure out a math problem after the mind twister had been carefully explained. You could debate it, ask questions, test attempts, do whatever you wanted. Some just spent the whole time explaining to others what the problem was. And it didn’t really matter if you solved it, in the sense that it was not required. You did it because it was the fun way that the adult proposed an equal to equal interaction, an authentic and dedicated interaction. For others it was a personal challenge or a chance to contribute uniquely to the overall effort.

Just a regular public school with a principal who was back from professional development… This happened all the time. One retired dad would come in for “science afternoons” and tell stories about technological developments and research areas that he had been reading about in popular science magazines.

I only learned to read when I eventually found something I wanted to read (how to breed aquarium fish). I only learned math when it made sense to me because I could see that the teacher understood it, so I knew there was something there to understand. I never learned anything from repetitive mechanical busywork or from regurgitating something on a test – never.

In my working class to middle class and suburban childhood, all I did outside of school was exactly what I could organize with my friends. There was always a ditch with insects and frogs in it. There was always a fort or a go-cart or a terrarium to build from stolen materials. There was always a neighbourhood-wide game of something. There was always a place to hide to experiment with matches or cigarettes or kissing. You only had to decide and re-decide and change your mind and tell others. School homework was a ten-minute affair except when you had school projects you liked.

Yes there was bullying and meanness but you worked out how to survive it rather than be completely managed by keeper adults. And there was racism and classism (and I was a “frog” in a harsh Anglo setting) but we negotiated protection rather than be subjected to limiting controls imposed by adults.

In stark contrast, today’s 24/7 structure on young peoples’ lives, today’s institutionalization and youth management practices, do not resemble the conditions that enable independent thinking.

***

STUDENT TRANSFORMED. When I started teaching, students were generally self-confident and bold by today’s standards. They would challenge me on the relevance of the material and point out when I was being repetitious. It was not difficult to elicit sincere feedback from the students and the students had the expectation that their feedback would be heeded.

Fast forward to the last five years or more and the students have segregated into two in-class-behaviour groups: formless sleep walkers and cookie-cutter keeners wanting to know if I could please assign more practice problems or more reading and could they volunteer for something.

It has been like waking up to a nightmare. There are more tests, exams, and homework than ever before and the dynamic performance of reliving and sharing discovery at the blackboard or in discussion has been replaced by dead-on-delivery PowerPoint presentations. And the students now expect this linear and bulleted format and are prepared without allergic reaction to regurgitate slide content on command and in any clicking order. [3] [4] [5]

More frightening than the glare of the projector and the everything-is-on-the-screen environment, however, is what I perceive of the student soul. Barring from-privilege nonchalance, the empty eyes translate a range of states from indifference to hopelessness to powerlessness to superficial engagement based on illusory impressions of having received intellectual nourishment.

The “ah-ha” moments (actual outbursts in class) and office-hour testimonies (teary-eyed and chocked up) of having “really” understood have been replaced with “it’s obvious; I get it; I can do it”. And, of course, the good grades reward this empty charade and train the student to judge his/her understanding on the basis of externalities rather than anchor this judgement in self-generated knowledge. [6] [7]

As a result, the majority of students have never developed the ability to discern when they do and do not understand something and they do not develop this ability in their undergraduate degrees. [ENDNOTE-1]

Students don’t know when they don’t know or when they do. Now how did that happen?

Partly the observed change was because more of the students were from the working and lower-middle classes and from the CEGEP system of Quebec, before the tuition fees were made to skyrocket. Partly it was because the students were a year older before Ontario’s “Harris revolution” arbitrarily cut one year from high school. Partly it was because the Harris revolution turned high school teachers into hurried and overworked (but well paid) delivery machines rather than respected professionals entitled to professional development and independence.

Partly the change accompanied a broader societal transformation from the relative economic freedom and middle-class workplace spiritual coolness of the sixties to the constraining obsession for “efficiency” brought on by manufactured crises used to justify redesigning the tax structure (from progressive to fascist) and crushing the workforce into submitting to the new regime. The new paradigms became “competitiveness” and prostitution to venture capitalists – a government-led campaign to mortgage both our natural resources and our labour futures and to attract the most ruthless global occupiers to practice extortion by debt.

The message to grade-school students went from “you can do anything you choose” to “you need to prepare for a competitive environment”.

As parents were put through the ringer, there were few adults at home and kids needed to be farmed out. So started the era of every freaking kid sports and extra classes and music and dance lessons and club and volunteer activity until you die driving them. According to the same “news” media that explained the virtues of attracting investors, the world became a dangerous place filled with child molesters and kidnappers on every corner and no kid could simply play outside.

At the present stage of the transformation in student psychology, my fourth-year physics students were initially telling me things like:

“I won’t learn if you don’t force me to.”
“Grades are what motivate me to learn.”

They were quite sincere. Frightening. The only way for such utterances to be compatible with a sustainable self-image is to have never experienced (or have no memory of) learning. Such is the present state of education. Canada’s developing military economy has no need for independent thinkers or learners. Do what we show you when we say. Period.

***

MARCH TOWARDS FASCISM. This means that we are expected to give up two components that are generally believed to be needed for human development and fulfilment: meaningful creative work and a true political influence. [8] [9] And what is love between individuals that cannot uniquely contribute to and transform community? What is love outside of community? It is difficult to mate caged animals.

Further, this is a change to the type of personality, socio-psychologists tell us, which is the defining prerequisite among individuals for fascism to take hold. [10] Fascism is not a distant historical anomaly. It is an optimum end-state towards which large-scale disruptive and predatory economic hierarchies tend. It is the state of total and unchallenged control of every facet of life by corporate masters of the economy, achieved by an optimized balance of force and a designed mental and social environment. Independent thought is eliminated and the possibility of even contemplating individual influence is rendered foreign. Fascism cannot be fully achieved by control of the mental (media) environment alone. The key institutions of education, organized leisure, and work must be aligned with the fascist project.

Several analysts have pointed out that the US plutocracy is already in an advanced stage of fascism. [11] This is relevant to Canada which has now integrated the US military economy to an unprecedented degree, from mythical peace-keeper to geopolitical architect and occupier. [12]

At the same time that globalization gave us bigger bosses who controlled more of our lives; professionals within public institutions went along with every evermore far reaching paradigm of social engineering and every evermore extreme application of the religion of the boss-controlled financial markets as the ultimate social remedy. At the same time that national economies were transformed into jurisdictions of foreign and mega-capital exploitation-by-investment and at the same time that markets for untested pharmaceuticals and agri-food practices were opened by putting the bosses in charge of public safety; the schools were being fitted with “standards and accountability” and after-school free time was being made “dangerous and wasteful.” [4] [5] Working parents were told to “rise to the challenge” of global market competition which in turn was used to legitimize losses of entire regional economic sectors as mega-capital prospected the globe for maximum returns.

That’s a lot of change; facilitated by always increasingly inhumane global monetary policy and expanding “free trade” zones. Acceptance, or rather compliance, by the First World middle class is carefully monitored and engineered at every step. A pivotal component is to prevent the development of independent thought and intellectual discernment so that fabricated concerns and their solutions can be received and adopted, so that superficial political oppositions can occupy all the space of allowed political “debate.”

How else can the present degree of widespread First World middle class stupidity be explained? The same psycho-socio-economic pattern from rising economic power-coalescence has been described to explain Italian and Nazi fascism. [10] The main difference today is a relative absence of imposed school uniforms but the same institutional drives to impose monochromaticity of thought and reactions are apparent; indeed too obvious to be seen. Radical elements are most expeditiously either “educated” or culled.

***

MAKING CHANGE. Next is what I tried to do about it on my watch. The dominant mythology was that I had “academic freedom” and that academic freedom was absolute protection for authentic pedagogical developments based on research and experience – that academic freedom was the safeguard that made the system work and that allowed for advancement and corrections.

My first response was to try to improve my classes more of less within mainstream practice. This led only to different degrees of self-deception and was ultimately unbearably frustrating. Students were receptive and pleased but learning remained superficial. Students did not own the material and could not project it creatively. They were happier bluffers. (The stuff good managers are made of.)

In parallel, I lashed out with letters calling for reform, to my bosses, and to committees and commissions charged with evaluating programs and education. These fell in a vacuum. There were no responses. I must have appeared crazy.

Finally, after much study and discussion with experts and an international group of physics teachers practicing critical pedagogy, I decided to break with half measures and to implement the full deal, without compromise.

In 2005 I practiced what became known as academic squatting and occupied a course as a critical pedagogue, giving the course to the co-occupiers, to the students and community members. It was dubbed the activism course. [13] The Dean of the Faculty of Science tried to kill it. The students rebelled and won. I was disciplined. I won the arbitration and a legal analysis journal summarized the award in a review entitled “Teaching Science through Social Activism is Protected by Academic Freedom, Arbitrator Rules.” [14]

The course was a sensation among students and community members. One student concluded: “Everything else is the same. This is different.” The following year (2006), thanks to unprecedented student demand and protest, it was given under a new official name in the largest auditorium on campus. That year some students sued the university for not providing enough teacher assistants for the course while two other students sued for being deregistered by the university on the basis of age discrimination, all creative political initiatives that I celebrated. Both cases made media headlines. The activism course was never allowed again. [15]

I then expanded these methods into all my courses, while being subjected to a broad disciplinary campaign of repression. The method, adapted as needed, applied to a traditional first-year physics course gave outstanding results throughout the semester and in the final examination. It was the most rewarding first-year traditional physics teaching experience I have ever had. One enthusiastic teacher assistant who came to all the classes on her own time chose to short-circuit her graduate physics degree to start an education program. (I was disciplined for supervisor deficiency as “evidenced” by the fact that she did not finish her physics graduate degree.) The course was removed from me the following year. [16]

Such was the fervour of my dedication to uncompromised education from 2005 on. I also exposed the University’s treatment of me and others in a detailed blog and the administration’s questionable politics, including all the examples of executive malfeasance that I could document. [17]

And I lectured to encourage others to occupy their classes, and promoted anarchism as a pedagogical development tool. The University hired a student journalist spy to covertly voice-record and transcribe my radical talks given on other campuses. The student reported directly to University Legal Counsel who, in turn, forwarded the recordings and transcripts to the VP-Academic. [18a] [18b]

Legal Counsel Michelle Flaherty abruptly left the University at approximately the same time that a covert voice recording was lost from the record that I have obtained via access to information law. [18b] She is now a vice-Chair (judge) with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.

To make a long story short, I was fired in 2009, following the arrival of former federal politician and former Minister of Justice Allan Rock as incoming president, after his verbal abuse of a student activist was exposed during a local television interview of me. [19][go to Nov.12 2008 video]

I was instantly and without warning locked out of my laboratory and office; accompanied off campus by university police. My research associate was fired without warning or explanation. My graduate students were removed and intimidated into choosing new supervisors. I was barred from my weekly documentary film and discussion series and from my weekly campus radio show. When I returned for a discussion night event I was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to Ottawa Police headquarters. [1] [19] [20]

Mr. Rock has repeatedly stated that all proper procedures were followed in my dismissal.

It appears that former Minister of Justice Allan Rock is of the opinion that, among other things, hiring a student journalist as “agent of University Legal Counsel” to practice extensive covert surveillance of me and students, from 2006 to 2008 and using such methods as a false Facebook identity to infiltrate student activist groups, constitutes simply “following procedure.”

On the contrary, I read the Rock administration’s actions as additional signs of emerging fascism. [21]

Hopefully, the arbitrator of my dismissal case will be a true independent thinker, if my union lets it get that far. (I want my classroom back so I can give it to the students.)

***

NOW IS THE TIME. My “progressive” colleagues have suggested that I had good ideas and good intensions but that my methods or my timing were ill-chosen. One colleague stated that you can study activism and you can teach activism but you cannot practice activism within academe. Several other colleagues commented that everything would have been fine if I had been quiet about it all. These reactions from the professoriate arise from the now age-old question of “separation between inquiry and reform” which has been at the heart of the debate about academic freedom since the nineteenth century. [22]

I have examined the work of my progressive colleagues and interviewed hundreds of students and dozens of experts about education and societal change and I am at a loss to find anything in what mainstream progressive pedagogues have done that slows the march towards fascism or creates cracks that allow some light to shine out from the hearts of students or shine in from the real world outside. [23] [24]

All of the transformations of North American mainstream education in recent decades have come from above and none have been effectively resisted by teachers or parents or students. There have been no grassroots initiatives affecting the mainstream classroom, no discoveries, no rebellion, nothing that has caught on. There has been only regression since 1968; the crest of the last period of momentary enlightenment when it was understood that teaching is impossible and that learning can only be stopped by suppression.

The schools have gobbled feminism and anti-oppression whole and spit out victims asking for a fairer society with better “protections.” The fire of rebellion has been replaced with “education” to train the oppressor to not oppress. Solidarity has come to mean being “like-minded.” Lifestyle choices have been re-invented as power politics. Modern medical practice is generally believed to contribute positively to public health, whereas one brave leading researcher suggests that it is the third leading cause of death, after everything cancer and everything cardio-vascular. [25] The “right to not be disturbed” has emerged alongside the rights to life and freedom. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has been “scientifically discovered” to be the main threat to humankind … Widespread First World middle class stupidity you say?

In physics there has emerged an area of research called “physics education research” (PER) and its only significant achievement has been to somewhat convincingly demonstrate that traditional physics education does not work, something every physics instructor who has ever graded a final examination with real questions knows.

And now the PER community moves on, to find better methods to teach physics concepts, within the confines of the vacuum that is a single discipline, in a world where “personal initiative” means dedication to accomplishing prescribed tasks and where “critical thinking” means finding better ways to support the corporate or institutional ideology of the day, and without a radical examination of the central question of intrinsic motivation. [26]

No. Now is the time to fight back and fighting back is the only real method. Now is the time for teachers and students and parents to take back the classroom. Classroom squatting is the most effective and radical (i.e., “to the root”) thing that teachers and students and parents can do. It is the most that teachers and students can do and it is the only thing that teachers and students can do that will help. And we must do it publicly so that we may join forces and to inspire others to do the same. [13]

In the words of Paulo Freire, arguably the greatest pedagogue, “You can only fight your own oppression.” He added that we were all oppressed by hierarchy and that the oppressed young person could only find liberation (growth, learning) if she managed to find “authentic rebellion.” [8] ●


[ENDNOTE-1] [START]

In the last course that I was allowed to teach (winter 2008) I was able to make a striking demonstration of the latter point, that student can no longer discern their own learning. It was a combined final (4th) year and graduate course in solid state physics, with 24 students in the class. At the start of the semester I needed to open up the possibility that maybe the students did not know when they understood a physics concept, in order to encourage deeper self-examination about the individual learning process.

I said “let’s look at Newton’s action-reaction law from first-year physics”. Eyes rolled. I drew a student on the green board, standing on a floor, and I drew an arrow pointing down to represent the force of the earth’s gravity on the stick-figure student. I said “OK, that is the action, what is the reaction?” “Forces come in pairs according to Newton’s action-reaction law.” “So what is the correct force to complete this pair?”

One student did not want to give a public answer and abstained. A few students said it would be the gravitational force exerted on the earth due to the mass of the stick-figure student. All the other students said that the reaction was the force that the floor exerted on the student to keep the stick-figure from being drawn to the centre of the earth.

I explained the question again in a different way to make certain that I had been understood, answered some questions of clarification, and asked if the students wanted to change their answers.

Some of these students were teaching or had taught this material as teacher assistants and all had used it extensively in their school work. The majority answer was wrong and I explained why it was wrong. I explained that this wrong answer demonstrates that the central concept could not possibly have been understood.

The students were shocked. It was a jaw dropper. One student said I had tricked them in the way I had asked the question. Several students (who had given the wrong answer) came to my defence and said no, that I had been very clear and that I had stated the question clearly in several ways.

Newton’s action-reaction law expresses a fundamental property of nature: Forces cannot exist on their own. Forces arise from interactions between bodies. The earth cannot act on the student via gravity without the student acting via gravity and in the same magnitude on the earth. Both forces (in this example) arise from the gravitational interaction between the two bodies. All pair-wise interactions (gravitational, electric, etc.) must affect both bodies equally. The action-reaction force-pair is an interaction-pair… a very deep and subtle concept about the nature of all interactions and all forces – a true discovery.

To be fair, many professors, including my former Physics Department Chairman, Dr. Bela Joos, have told their first-year students that the reaction is the force from the floor, and have gone into detailed explanations, year after year, as to how this arises; until I asked the doctor to explain it to me at coffee one day, having quizzed his former students in a second-semester course.

In the end, all the students in my winter-2008 solid state course (except one who dropped the course) progressed exceptionally well and all received A+ as a final grade. Dr. Joos probably also had many A+ grades in his student career but my findings suggest that he may not have deserved them?

[ENDNOTE-1] [END]


Unlinked References:

[4] “The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing” by Alfie Kohn

[5] “Teaching By Numbers - Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education” by Peter M. Taubman

[8] “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire

[9] “Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars” by Paul Goodman

[10] “The Fear of Freedom” (UK edition) / “Escape from Freedom” (US edition) by Erich Fromm

[22] “No Ivory Tower” by Ellen Schrecker

[25] Starfield, Barbara (2000, July 26). Is US health really the best in the world? Journal of the American Medical Association, 284(4), 483-485.

List of other essays by Denis G. Rancourt:
www.academicfreedom.ca/blogs/essays