Alex WellersteinVerified account

I wasn't there, so am basing my comments on hearsay, but tweets on the variation of "X% of Americans don't take a history class after 12th grade" are strikingly reminiscent of scientists' rhetoric in post-Sputnik science curriculum reforms.

The case I know best is biology; the specific claim was that "for 80% of high school students, biology is the last science class they'll ever take."

University scientists interpreted stats like this as evidence of getting the high school science curriculum right. If good citizenship required a scientific education, then high school biology was their last chance.

Now, these university scientists weren't wrong that some high school science curriculums weren't great. BUT. These were university scientists, mostly researchers, not educators.

When they talked about it, they tended to put the blame on schools of education. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they believed that the problem was that educators, rather than scientists, controlled the process.

Is this starting to sound familiar yet? Because it should.

Can you take a guess about the gender and class dynamic of this situation? Even for science teachers in the 1950s?

Again, I wasn't at SHEAR. I also have a completely uninformed sense that high school social studies and history teachers skew more male than secondary education teachers, more generally. But still.