A Harvard task force has concluded that Harvard undergraduate education needs improvement. One task force member is Eric Mazur, a professor of physics. He has presumably given the matter a lot of thought. Here is what he does and says:
As a model for innovative teaching, Professor Skocpol [head of the task force] pointed to Professor Mazur, the physicist.
He threw out his lectures in his introductory physics class when he realized his students were not absorbing the underlying principles, relying instead on memory to solve problems. His classes now focus on students working in small groups.
“When I asked them to apply their knowledge in a situation they had not seen before, they failed,” Professor Mazur said. “You have to be able to tackle the new and unfamiliar, not just the familiar, in everything. We have to give the students the skills to solve such problems. That’s the goal of education.”
The other faculty in Professor Mazur’s department are surely terrific at tackling “new and unfamiliar” physics problems, which is the skill Professor Mazur wants to teach his students. Yet these other faculty are obviously not good teachers. (When he lectured, Mazur was simply imitating those around him.) I conclude that the skills needed to (a) do good physics research and (b) teach physics well are quite different. So why is Mazur emphasizing the skills needed to do the former (research) and not the latter (teaching)? And what about all the other jobs in the world — what do “you have to be able to” do in those jobs? The goal of education is not as obvious as Mazur claims.
The electrical charge of a single electron was first determined by Robert Millikan, who made a mistake in his calculations (wrong value for the viscosity of air). It was several years before this mistake was noticed. In the meantime, other physicists calculated the charge on a single electron. They did not make Millikan’s mistake — yet they got nearly the same (wrong) answer! Over time, the answers gradually drifted toward the correct answer.
That is essentially what is happening here. Mazur realizes something is wrong with the current system, but he has twisted his thinking — just as post-Millikan scientists determining the charge of an electron tweaked their equipment and data analyses — until the discrepancy is small enough to live with. The notion that “the goal of education” is being able to solve new and unfamiliar physics problems (or new and unfamiliar problems in general) doesn’t survive even a little scrutiny, but that’s what a Harvard professor who cares about education has come to believe.