Life for the Fossil

To U.S. high school students, no science is more popular than biology--the first time around. Some 1,200,000 students take an introductory course in biology every year, but barely 2% come away with enough interest to take a second. Many educators think they know why: high school biology is fossilized. Students perform perfunctory experiments to prove points already memorized, poke away at frogs and recite by rote an endless, largely meaningless list of Latin names, learning little of the processes by which life exists on earth and which have fascinated man since the beginning of time. Says Biologist Paul DeHart Kurd of Stanford University: "The mere skeleton of science is presented, and the facts are divorced from anything that might be called the processes of science, sterilized of their beauty and left dangling without a place in the scheme of things."

Last week members of the American Institute of Biological Sciences opened a six-week meeting at the University of Colorado in Boulder to put some life into the study of living things by revising the high school curriculum from amoeba to zygote. With an initial $738,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, which has already spent more than $8,000,000 to upgrade high school physics, math and chemistry, the biologists have no illusions about producing high schools full of biology majors. But they do hope to increase the percentage considerably, and at the very least give every youngster a good idea of what the science is all about. Says Dr. Arnold Grobman, director of the Colorado project, who is on leave from his job as director of the Florida State Museum at the University of Florida: "We feel that the one biology course in high school is, in the majority of cases, the last chance to get across the concept of science as an ongoing, self-correcting, intellectual activity. We want our students to be biologically literate when they leave school."

Three Ideas. For a starter, the educators at Boulder will remove the dead weight of words from biology. They estimate that a first-year biology student must absorb more strange--and unpronounceable--new words than he does in any first-year foreign language course. Then they plan to organize the facts of biology around a few key ideas so that the students will get a better grasp of the whole. "We want biology," says Zoologist John A. Moore of Columbia University, "not plants plus animals, each in splendid isolation, as is so often done in many courses. A Cook's tour of the plant and animal kingdom is no longer considered an effective way to proceed."

After 18 months' preliminary study, the Colorado group decided to work on three central ideas, divided into the "blue, yellow and green courses." The blue, or physiological approach to biology, will emphasize the underlying cellular activity in all living matter; the yellow, or morphological approach, will compare the structures of organic types; while the green, or ecological approach, will trace the evolution of forms and how they relate to one another. Specific species and experiments will fit into the overall pattern, not dominate the course.

Plenty of Help. Once the basic courses are worked out and preliminary tests written, the biologists will put their ideas to classroom test. Later this summer, ten volunteer students will try the courses and offer criticism. This fall the new methods will be tested in 105 selected high schools around the U.S.; the group will do more revising and expand the test to 500 schools in the 1961-62 school year. By the summer of 1962, A.I.B.S. expects to have its material well enough in hand to put into final textbook form.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.