Elementary Particles

In the valentine-decorated first-grade room of Washington Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif., Teacher Jeanne Gibson last week tested her tots on some questions that would stump most pupils long after they learned to read.

"What is force?" she asked.

"Force is acting upon other things in any direction," answered a small boy.

"What happens," asked Teacher, "if two forces are equal?" "It stays still," shouted two eager boys.

"What if one force is stronger?" "It goes the way that there's most force," answered a little girl.

These space-age children are taking an experimental science curriculum drawn up by University of California Physicist Robert Karplus, 32, whose specialty is not elementary school teaching but elementary particles. (Sample Karplus research paper: "Spectral Representations in Perturbation Theory--The Vertex Function.") A Vienna-born infant prodigy who could multiply four-digit numbers in his head before he went to first grade, Harvard-trained (Ph.D., 1948) Karplus got to worrying about schools after he became a father (three girls, two boys, a sixth child on the way). Listening to teachers talk about the problems of teaching science, he decided that high schools fall down on training good college students because they get ill-prepared prospects out of grade school. Karplus' solution: "A compulsory common curriculum in the elementary school."

Intuitive Perception. Backed by the Berkeley public schools, the University of California's education department and a $40,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Karplus set out to "isolate a small number of ideas that underlie all natural phenomena," make these understandable to children by "direct intuitive perception." He first tackled the concepts of position and direction, developed a course called "coordinates." He taught teachers to hook their index fingers together and pull. Said he: "That's the beginning of Newton's Third Law."-- Using his curriculum's careful exposition of contact, field and frictional forces, teachers and pupils brought wood blocks, rubber bands, magnets, Band-Aid boxes and buttons to class, found them suddenly interesting as demonstrations of physical laws.

First-graders could grasp only qualitative ideas, but Karplus' second-level curriculum (second, third, fourth grades) introduced numbered quantities through use of such devices as rubber-band scales made in class by the pupils. By the sixth grade, the children were innocently testing the influence of orbit size on centrifugal force.

"You know," marveled one teacher, "they actually ask you for more homework." Pure Curiosity. First explorers of Karplus' Coordinates/Force curricula were 572 first-to-sixth-grade pupils in three Bay Area elementary schools. By the time the pupils finished the test course this week, three more elementary schools were ready to join the experiment. Said Berkeley Superintendent C. H. Wennerberg: "It's a pilot project which speaks to schools across the country." Pushing on, Karplus talked a pair of fellow professors, one in biochemistry and the other in physiology, into drafting and testing a similar elementary course in physiology. Main source of pupils' "intuitive perception" in this area: their own bodies. Coming slower is a chemistry professor's promised curriculum on atomic structures.

Karplus' crew was encouraged by reports that other topflight scientists, notably at Stanford, the University of Illinois and Yale, are turning their talents to science education in other elementary schools around the country. All are learning that children show a purer form of scientific curiosity before they become self-conscious teen-agers filled with imprecise words and a fear of numbers. "They are young adults in high school," says Karplus. "But younger children will burn their hands in fire, step on thin ice, and jump out the window to see what happens."

* "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts."

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