Abstract
In May 1960, while PSSC was preparing its course for nationwide distribution and BSCS was deep into its writing phase, John Hersey’s book The Child Buyer was published.Written in the form of hearings before a senate committee on education,welfare, and public morality, the novel described the fictional exploits of Wissey Jones, a vice president in charge of human procurement for the U.S. conglomerate United Lymphomilloid, following his arrival in the small New England town of Pequot. His purpose there was to secure the purchase of a local ten-year-old child prodigy. As the story unfolds, the reader learns that U. Lympho, as the company is known, has contracted with the federal government to conduct top-secret research crucial to the country’s national security, and Jones is out to accumulate the raw material for the project. “I buy brains,” he states under questioning, brains that have not yet “been spoiled by … what passes for education”; brains that will be accelerated and enhanced through a highly technical process developed at U. Lympho and administered through Hack Sawyer University, an institution of higher education that might one day provide a template for a new kind of learning.1 The training process, Jones explained to the senate committee in the book, had the power to multiply the IQ of its specimens nearly tenfold, primarily by eliminating the emotional energy brilliant children often spent in the largely futile search “for meaning, for values, for the significance of life.”2
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Chapter 7
John Hersey, The Child Buyer (New York: Knopf, 1960), 3
3. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light:American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 203–210;“The Critics Go to the Poll,” Saturday Review, 1 October 1960, 17
4. Frank G. Jennings, “Black Market in Brains,” Saturday Review, 24 September 1960, 21; Sidney Shalett, “A Chapter of Our Time,” New York Times Book Review, 25 September 1960, 4. Margaret Halsey, “The Shortest Way with Assenters,” 21–22; B. F. Skinner, “May We Have a Positive Contribution,” 22; Carl F. Hansen, “Educator vs. Educationist,” 23; Robert Graham Davis, “An Arrangement in Black and White,” 24;William Jay Smith, “The Truly Handicapped,” 25–26, all in New Republic, 10 October 1960
7. “American Education and the Sciences,” New Republic, 25 November 1957, 4–5; “Time and Money,” New Republic, 6 January 1958, 7–8; Karl Shapiro, “Why Out-Russia Russia?,” New Republic, 9 June 1958, 10; George Fischer, “Mistaken Envy: Soviet and American Education,” Progres- sive, March 1958, 14–22; Donald J. Hughs, “On Keeping Up with the Russians,” Nation, 7 June 1958, 507–510; Eugene Lyons, “Soviet Education: Myth and Fact,” National Review, 26 April 1958, 397–398.
David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia:A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 52; Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine Revisited: American Educational Policy Since 1945, updated ed. (New York: Longman, 1989), vii.
Scott L. Montogomery, Minds for the Making:The Role of Science in American Education, 1750–1990 (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 211.
Jerrold Zacharias, “A Scientist Looks at Scientists,” in The Scientific Revolution: Challenge and Promise, ed. G.W. Elbers and P. Duncan (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1959), 138; Zacharias interview, PSSC/OHC.
Arnold Grobman, “The Biological Sciences Curriculum Study,” unpublished report, ca. April 1959, box 9, Bates Papers.
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Pursuit of Excellence: Education and the Future of America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 28; Unedited transcript, Round Table No. 6, “Public Understanding of the Scientist,” 3 February 1958, box 8, PCSE
15. Warren Weaver, “A Great Age for Science,” in Goals for Americans, President’s Commission on National Goals (New York:The American Assembly, Columbia University, 1960), 105, 103.
Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science:The Military-Industrial- Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes, eds., Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000); AAAS Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare, “Science and Human Welfare,” Science 132 (1960): 69
Joseph Turner, “When Boys Will Be Buys,” Science 132 (1960):1367
Joseph J. Schwab, “Science and Civil Discourse: The Uses of Diversity,” Journal of General Education 9 (1956): 142.
PSSC memo, “What We Seem to Know,” 11 October 1956, box 1, PSSC/OHC
C. Ray Carpenter handwritten notes, 9 September 1959, box 41, Carpenter Papers.
26. Alan T. Waterman, “General Considerations Concerning United States Progress in Science and Education,” unpublished typescript, 31 July 1958, box 4, OSAST.
30. C. Ray Carpenter handwritten notes, 9 September 1959, box 41, Carpenter Papers.
32. MIT, “Project Troy Report to the Secretary of State,” annex 14, p. 2,Troy Report Files. Concerns among liberal intellectuals over just this sort of domestic use of “propaganda” are discussed in Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
Michels, “Teaching Aids-Texts,” unpublished typescript, 1 January 1955, emphasis added NAS/CPP.
39. PSSC, “General Report,” 25 March 1957, box 17, PSSC Papers.
40. PSSC, Physics (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1960); for emphasis on waves see Zacharias interview, PSSC/OHC.
41. Lab meeting minutes, May 20 1959; June 1 1959; June 10 1959, box 3; Guenter Schwarz, “Ripplers and Rippletanks; An Informal Report,” June 8 1959, box 3, PSSC Papers.
Jerrold R. Zacharias, “Into the Laboratory,” Science Teacher 24, no. 7 (1957): 324.
Friedman, “A Blueprint,” Science Teacher 24, no. 7 (1957): 321
Jerrold R. Zacharias, “Educational Methods and Today’s Science—Tomorrow’s Promise,” Technology Review 59 (1957): 503.
Jack S. Goldstein, A Different Sort of Time:The Life of Jerrold Zacharias (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 24–36.
Paul Forman, “Atomichron: The Atomic Clock from Concept to Commercial Product,” Proceedings of the IEEE 73 (1985): 1181–1204.
The scientists at the time were certainly conscious of the potential for military distortion of their work, see Louis N. Ridenour, “Should the Scientists Resist Military Intrusion?,” American Scholar 16 (Spring, 1947): 213–218, along with comments by Philip Morrison,Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, and Donald Young, 218–223; also the follow up article, Albert Einstein, Alan T.Waterman, Robert K. Merton,William Y. Elliott, Douglas P.Adams, and Aldous Huxley, “Should the Scientists Resist Military Intrusion?:The Reader Replies,” American Scholar 16 (Summer, 1947): 353–360; Paul Forman, “Into Quantum Electronics:The Maser as ‘Gadget’ of Cold War America,” in National Military Establishments, ed. Forman and Sánchez-Ron, 261–326.
58. Roger L. Geiger, “Science and the University: Patterns from the US Experience in the Twentieth Century,” in Science in the Twentieth Century, edJohn Krige and Dominique Pestre (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 159–174
Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics,” 216.This view is supported by the work of Ian Hacking, see, “Weapons Research,” in Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 163–185.For alternative views on the influence of military research expenditures on the form of scientific knowledge produced see Daniel Kevles, “Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State, 1945–1956,” HSPS 20 (1990): 239–264; and Roger Gieger, “Science, Universities, and National Defense, 1945–1970,” Osiris, 2d series, 7 (1992): 26–48
64. On the effect of this shift on graduate and undergraduate education in physics see Leslie, Cold War and American Science; on the applied products generated from this work, see Robert Buderi, The Invention that Changed the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
E. L. Ginzton, “Microwaves,” Science 127 (1958): 841.
69. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Physics and the Emergence of Molecular Biology: A History of Cognitive and Political Synergy,” JHB 23 (1990): 389–409; Lily E. Kay, “Problematizing Basic Research in Molecular Biology,” in Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences, ed.Arnold Thackray (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 20–38; Pnina G. Abir-Am, “The Molecular Transformation of Twentieth-Century Biology,” in Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. Krige and Pestre, 495–524. Much of this transformation in biology was underway in the 1930s as a result of the program in molecular biology established by the Rockefeller Foundation. World War II, however, accelerated the pace of the transition considerably.
On the social uses to which biology was often put in schools, see Philip J. Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 171–193
71. Committee on Educational Policies, Recommendations on Undergraduate Curricula in the Biological Sciences (Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, 1958), 23
Harry J. Fuller, “The Emperor’s New Clothes, or Prius Dementat,” Scientific Monthly 72 (1951): 38.
Nicholas Rasmussen, “The Mid-Century Biophysics Bubble: Hiroshima and the Biological Revolution in America, Revisited,” History of Science 35 (1997): 245–293; and Lily E. Kay, “Conceptual Models and Analytical Tools:The Biology of Physicist Max Delbrück,” JHB 18 (1985):207–246
Wallace O. Fenn, “Front Seats for Biologists,” speech given before the AIBS annual meeting, Stillwater, OK, 29 August 1960, box 3,Wallace O. Fenn Papers, Edward G. Miner Library, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY
78. Moore, BSCS:Penultimate Revision of Objectives, 16 January 1960,BSCS Papers.
83. Toby A. Appel, Shaping Biology:The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945–1975 (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 208.
NSF staff paper, “Perspectives in the Life Sciences,” ca. May 1963, NSF/HF.
85. NSF staff paper, “Perspectives in the Life Sciences,” ca. May 1963, NSF/HF
91. BSCS supplementary film list, 3 November 1962, box 10, Bates Papers.
92. Glass, unpublished typescript on laboratory innovations, ca. January 1960, BSCS Papers; Addison E. Lee, David L. Lehman, and Glen E. Peterson, eds., Laboratory Blocks in Teaching Biology, BSCS Special Publication no. 5 (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Biological Sciences, 1967), 8; Addison E. Lee, Plant Growth and Development: A Laboratory Block (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1963); Florence Moog, Animal Growth and Development:A Laboratory Block (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1963). The connection between plant hormone research and World War II is made in Nicholas Rasmussen, “Plant Hormones in War and Peace: Science, Industry, and Government in the Development of Herbicides in 1940s America,” Isis 92 (2001): 291–316.
93. BSCS Steering Committee meeting minutes, 26 May 1962, BSCS Papers; Joseph J. Schwab, Biology Teachers’ Handbook (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963)
See, for example, David P.Ausubel, “An Evaluation of the BSCS Approach to High School Biology,” American Biology Teacher 28 (1966): 176–184;G. L. Stebbins to Grobman, n.d., box 9, Bates Papers.
Marston Bates, The Natural History of Mosquitoes (New York: Macmillan, 1949) and The Nature of Natural History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950).
Joel B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank:The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 100–121.
Hagen, Entangled Bank, 78–145; See also, Peter J.Taylor, “Technocratic Optimism, H. T. Odum, and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor after World War II,” JHB 21 (1988): 213–244; Stephen Bocking, “Ecosystems, Ecologists, and the Atom: Environmental Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory,” JHB 28 (1995): 1–47
BSCS, High School Biology: BSCS Green Version (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), 1–75
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology:The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 134–138, 149.
103. NSF staff paper, “Perspectives in the Life Sciences,” ca.May 1963, NSF/HF.
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© 2002 John L. Rudolph
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Rudolph, J.L. (2002). Science/Education Transformed. In: Scientists in the Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107366_8
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