Reading Notes: Action and Reaction: Teaching Physics in Context by David Jhirad & Al Weinrub

The audience for this course was 250 sophomores, the vast majority of whom were non-majors in the physical and biological sciences.

 "The course began with an analysis of the institutional and conceptual foundation of physics today. In fact, since Al’s first lecture came the day after the Attica massacre, it was devoted to how science and technology in this society provide methods for repression, control and murder. It was magnificently received."

 "While ambitious in design, this course met with only limited success. Billed as a required course in physics for non-science majors it had a lot of student antipathy to contend with. Students came into the course either feeling hostility towards anything scientific, or convinced of the irrelevance of physics to their major interests, or frightened of their inability to handle the mathematical and abstract character of physics. Some students exhibited all of these attitudes!"

"This character of the course raises the question of relevance, and whether such introductory courses in conceptual physics should be given in the first place. For many of us, our knowledge of Newton’s laws, for example, is not used much in our day to day lives. Why then is such a course important as part of the liberal education and why is it worthwhile for radicals?"

"The value in teaching Newton’s Laws does not lie in worshiping Newton’s intellectual genius, but rather in understanding the general ideological climate accompanying the birth of capitalism, in seeing the science of the 17th century as being a starting point for the new productive relations by providing a philosophical break from the past, and in viewing 17th century science as an outgrowth of the technology needed for expansion of the industrial and mercantile sectors of the economy."