P. E. HODGSON is Senior Research Fellow Emeritus
in Physics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is
the author, most recently, of Theology and the New
Physics (2005).
It is universally recognised that education is
vital for the future prosperity of the world,
and yet at the present time there are serious
defects that merit determined action. I can
speak only from my limited experience,
which is mainly that of teaching physics and
mathematics and leading a research group in
Oxford University for about forty years.
Still, what I have to say is reinforced by the
experience of many others in higher education.
The principal aim of education is to help
the student to grow up, to face reality, to
accept the consequences of his actions, and
become a well-balanced personality. In more
technical subjects the student must learn and
understand the basic facts, procedure, and
theories that are essential for his future professional
life. It is the student who is responsible
for his growth in knowledge; the role of
the teacher is to inspire, to encourage, and
where necessary to correct. The student must
be allowed to analyse, criticise and gradually
to assimilate ideas, a process to be sharply
distinguished from indoctrination.
To be successful, education requires the
student to be industrious and keen to learn
and the teacher to be knowledgeable, conscientious,
and caring. If the student lacks enthusiasm,
nothing useful can be done. As
Confucius remarked: “Only one who bursts
with eagerness do I instruct; only one who
bubbles with excitement do I enlighten. If I
hold up one corner and a man cannot come
back to me with the other three, I do not
continue the lesson.” The teacher respects the
freedom of the student, who has the responsibility
to exert all his efforts to understand
and to learn, to make the knowledge and the
ideas his own. If he is really in difficulties he
can ask his teacher for help, and this help
should willingly be given, but only just enough
to overcome the immediate difficulty, leaving
the rest for the student.
I expected my Oxford tutorial students to
make their best efforts to understand their
subject through reading books and attending
lectures, and discussing any problems with
each other. At the tutorial, I would ask them
what difficulties they had encountered, and
then we would together try to solve them.
This is a risk: I might not know the answer.
When this happened we tried to find the
answer together and this can be more instructive
than if I had always been able to give the
answer at once. Eventually they will have to
find answers for themselves.
together try to solve them.
This is a risk: I might not know the answer.
When this happened we tried to find the
answer together and this can be more instructive
than if I had always been able to give the
answer at once. Eventually they will have to
find answers for themselves.
To prepare for his task, the teacher must
first master his subject, for we cannot teach
what we do not know. I still recall my horror
when as a small schoolboy I realised that my
mathematics teacher thought that pi equals
exactly 22/7. We must remain fresh and
enthusiastic about our subject, always seeking
to learn more, so that we can share our
enthusiasm with our students.
He who learns from one still engaged in
learning
Drinks the clear waters of the running
stream.
He who learns from one who has learned
all he will ever know
Drinks the green mantle of the stagnant
pool.
University teaching is much easier than
teaching in a school because one usually has
no problems with discipline, and also one has
the duty of continuing research. Research is
exciting and interesting, with all its ups and
downs, and it can easily absorb nearly all our
time. University lecturers soon realise that,
despite much lip service to the contrary, our
professional advancement depends on the
excellence of our research, not at all on our
teaching. Preparing lectures properly is very
time-consuming, and so it is a serious temptation
to spend as little time as possible on
them, and then it is the students who suffer.
There are not a few distinguished scientists
who have achieved high positions but are
well known for their bad lectures.
The same educational principles apply to
the supervision of graduate students. Their
supervisor is responsible for stimulating and
aiding their intellectual development. They
are not to be treated as slaves to further his
own career. When they start they seldom
know enough to choose their own problem,
so the supervisor suggests one suitable to their
abilities. The amount of help is adjusted to
the capacity of the student and is kept as small
as possible. Intervention is necessary only
when the student is really unable to see the
way forward. Occasionally the supervisor
may decide not to intervene even if he
foresees that the path chosen by the student is
likely to be unfruitful. Failure can be a useful
experience, and the student must never feel
that the supervisor is checking his every step.
The supervisor always encourages the student
to stand on his own feet, and take
responsibility for his decisions. He looks
forward to the day when the student will
himself suggest a problem. Research has to be
original. I recall a student whom I had to
terminate saying plaintively: “But I did all
that you told me to do.” As the years pass, the
relationship between student and supervisor
changes from that of pupil to master to that
of collaborators in a great adventure.
With postdoctoral students a tougher line
is possible. One such student came to see me
soon after he arrived and asked me what he
should do. He evidently knew the custom in
many counties where the professor directs
such students to projects that will enhance his
own research programme. I could have used
him to further some of my own ideas, but
instead I just told him to go and do some good
physics. This forced him to think about the
present state of knowledge and to decide
where he could best contribute. He soon
decided on a line of research and followed it
up very successfully. Long afterwards he told
me that this was the turning point in his life.
Subsequently I realised that I was instinctively
following a national tradition. This is
illustrated by some letters written by the
Russian physicist Peter Kapitza. In a letter
from Cambridge to his mother on 6 July
1922 he compares the Russian and German
autocratic systems with what he found in
England: “England has produced the most
outstanding physicists and I’m now beginning
to understand why. The English school
lays great stress on the development of individuality
and gives infinite scope for personal
initiative. The absence of rigid patterns and
routines is one of its basic characteristics.”
After he had been forcibly prevented by
the Soviet authorities from returning to
Cambridge, he wrote to his wife on 1 February
1935, saying that he had discussed with
Pavlov the freedom necessary for a scientist:
“With a stick over him a man can only be
made to dig the ground but not to make
scientific discoveries.” On 23 March 1944 he
wrote to the Prime Minister G. M. Malenkov
complaining about his treatment: “There is
no need to prod me to get on with my work
and during my life I have never permitted
this.” Scientists are driven by a passion to
understand the world. To try to tell us what
to do by managing, assessing, and threatening
not only destroys our creativity but is
deeply offensive, insulting, and counterproductive.
Teaching is much more than just the
transfer of information from one person to
another; that could be done equally well if not
better by a computer. Teaching is a person to
person encounter, and we teach as much or
more by what we are than by what we say.
“To educate is to communicate one’s self: cor
loquitur ad cor (“heart speaks to heart”), as
Newman described human communication.
As Polanyi emphasized, we know more than
we can say, and so we learn by personal
contact, by working with a master, and so
absorb much that could never be put into
words.
Scientists need to develop a historical
perspective, to base their knowledge on
personal experience and to cultivate a critical
spirit. Most scientists lack a historical perspective;
they are interested in what is happening
now. Scientists rarely read anything
written earlier than a few years ago, and
almost never do they read the works of the
masters of the subject such as Newton,
Einstein, Maxwell, and Rutherford. Their
names are familiar from their association
with their laws, theories, and discoveries, but
the historical dimension is absent. This is a
great loss, and it is possible for a teacher to
give some appreciation of the historical development
by a few well-chosen remarks.
Second, it is essential that what the student
learns is rooted in personal experience. He
must make a few simple experiments himself.
This encounter with objective reality will
show him how difficult it is to get an apparatus
to work properly and to obtain a reliable
result. This experience can be reinforced by
accounts of the heroic struggles of the pioneers.
At the same time it is essential to solve
many mathematical problems to attain familiarity
with the language of physics.
Third, the need for criticism. To master
an idea it is necessary to be able to defend it
against possible objections. If one is criticizing
a theory, one should be able to expound
it at least as well as it proponents. Only when
an argument has been criticized in all possible
ways, and the arguments for and against
analyzed, can we say that we have really
understood it. The motive of criticism is to
build up, not to destroy, and to attain deeper
knowledge.
Teaching can fail in many ways. Feynman
was asked to give his opinion of the teaching
of physics in Brazil, so he attended several
examinations. A student was asked, for example,
to define Brewster’s angle. Being a
good student, he rattled off the textbook
definition. Then Feynman gave him a piece
of Polaroid film and asked him to look out of
the window through the film. He did so and
was astonished to find that the light was
polarized. He had textbook knowledge, but
it had never been connected with observations
of real phenomena. At the final meeting,
Feynman told the faculty that only two
students had shown any real knowledge of
physics. The two students mentioned then
said that they had recently arrived from
Germany.
Another example is provided by teachers
who are unsure of their knowledge. They
repeat to the students what is in the textbooks
and solve problems whose solutions are provided.
They never let the students try to solve
a problem for which no solution is provided,
for fear that they will be asked to solve it
themselves and might be disgraced by their
failure. You can never learn how to swim or
to ride a bicycle just by reading an instruction
manual; you have to take a plunge and
learn by experience.
The true teacher welcomes critical questions.
Criticism is a positive factor. To refuse
to answer a question is to admit to uncertainty
and ignorance. Sometimes one encounters
people who have fixed ideas and
nothing will ever change them. They are
impervious to arguments and scornful of
criticism. To welcome questions is to make
oneself vulnerable; this is part of the risk of
education. Another risk is the possibility that
the question will show that we are wrong, but
this should be welcomed as a step towards the
truth. We do not lose face if we admit that we
do not know. On the contrary, it is those who
pretend that they know but evidently do not
that are objects of derision and contempt.
It is always important to seek and accept
reality. It is obvious folly to ignore reality,
but the difficulties of attaining it are often
underestimated. The aim of the physicist is to
reach the truth about that natural world, and
this requires detailed critical studies. There
are many obstacles in the way, and it requires
sustained endeavour to reach the goal. One
thinks, for example, of the lonely labours of
Kepler who spent twenty-two years vainly
trying to find the orbit of the planet Mars,
and eventually being forced by his calculations
to abandon the Aristotelian belief that it
is a circle. Similarly Planck spent years trying
to avoid the conclusion that energy is quantified,
and was eventually forced to accept
the quantum that lies at the heart of modern
physics. Such examples show that we do not
impose our ideas on the world but must,
whether we like it or not, accept reality.
Finally, I would like to mention some of
the defects of contemporary education, under
the three headings of trust, discipline, and
truth. A pervasive evil is the lack of trust in
professionals to get on with their work in
accord with its inner nature. This is due to the
neglect of a principle that is blindingly obvious
to everyone engaged in actually doing
something, but is completely opaque to the
bureaucrats who have never in their lives
done anything constructive.
This principle was articulated with great
clarity by an Oxford philosopher who was
employed by the Treasury before he was
appointed to Oxford. His office in the Treasury
was responsible for an organisation in
charge of the geological survey of East Africa.
He had to check the accounts, and one
day he received an Application to Destroy
Stores. Reading the document carefully, he
realised that the stores in question had already
been destroyed. “Ah ha,” he said to himself,
“something is very wrong here.” So he sent
off a letter drawing attention to the applicant’s
grave lapse of proper procedure. A few days
later he received a telephone call from a man
who said that he would like to explain how
things work in East Africa. They take their
equipment by jeep as far as they could go,
and then use mules or carry it themselves
through rough country for the rest of the
journey. When they have finished their
work, they collect their equipment that is still
in good order and carry it back. However,
some things by then were wrecked and
useless. Were they really expected to carry
useless equipment all the way back to the
camp? At this point the future philosopher
suddenly saw the light, and promised the
caller never to write such a letter again. He
had learned in an instant something that
current theories and practice of administration
make almost unlearnable: “Those who
do the work, once it is entrusted to them,
must do it in accord with criteria internal to
the work, which are implicit in the work.”
This principle should be engraved in stone at
all schools and universities.
This is called the principle of subsidiarity,
namely that the higher level of an organisation
should never arrogate to itself what a lower
level can perfectly well carry out on its own.
Individuals and intermediate institutions
should have the freedom to exercise their
proper responsibilities. Just as it is wrong to
take away from individuals what they can
accomplish by their own ability and efforts
and entrust it to the community, so it is an
injury and at the same time both a serious evil
and a disturbance of right order to assign to
a larger and higher society what can be
performed successfully by smaller and lower
communities.
Bureaucratic interference is not a new
phenomenon. In the midst of fighting Napoleon
during the Peninsular war, Wellington
experienced intolerable interference from
bureaucrats in London. They asked him, for
example, to account for the inordinate number
of jars of strawberry jam consumed by his
soldiers. He was driven to write to the
Secretary of State: “My Lord, If I attempted
to answer the mass of futile correspondence
that surrounds me, I should be debarred from
all serious business of campaigning. I shall see
that no officer under my command is debarred
by attending to the futile drivelling of
mere quill driving from attending his first
duty which is, and always has been, so to train
the men under his command that they may
without question beat any force opposed to
them in the field.”
In spite of these historical lessons, schools
are still showered with instructions about
what to teach and how the results are to be
assessed. The result is that teachers can spend
less and less time on actually teaching, as
more and more time is taken up by endless
tests and form filling. Schoolchildren in Britain
are among the most stressed and tested,
and have poorer achievement levels than
those in most other countries. More and
more parents are sending their children to
private schools, although these are by no
means free from State interference.
It is the same in universities. A few years
ago we were all subjected to a research
assessment exercise. We each received a
thick wad of forms with four pages of questions
to be answered for each piece of research
undertaken during the last two years.
The answers were used to judge the standard
of research in each department and thus
serve as a guide for future financial support.
The assessment exercises implied that the
bureaucrats did not trust the professors and
lecturers of Oxford University to carry out
their research to the best of their abilities,
although presumably they did trust their
assessors, whoever they were. The time wasted
by completing these forms was taken away
from research, and one may well ask, who
are the mighty intellects able to assess the
information provided by the hundred or so
senior physicists at Oxford, experienced as
they are in a wide range of specialities across
the whole of physics. A colleague of mine
was so incensed that he wrote a letter to the
University Magazine: “When I and my friends
read these forms, we all fell about laughing.
We asked ourselves whatever could be the
purpose of thee forms? Then we understood:
obviously the university wanted to find out
which members of the academic staff were
mentally deficient because obviously you
were if you answered all those questions.
Well, mine’s in the bin, and if they want it
they will find it there.” He was rather
unpopular with the university administration
after that.
The admissions procedure, by which tutors
choose their pupils and establish a personal
relationship with them, is also under
threat. Now it has to be so conducted that one
can if necessary justify one’s decisions in a
court of law. It is even suggested that the
whole process be taken over by a computer,
in the interests of efficiency. This will destroy
the personal relationship which is the foundation
of the tutorial system.
It might be objected that such controls are
necessary in order to prevent abuses and to
identify “unproductive” staff members. Inevitably
some teachers are more conscientious
than others, but it is far better to put up
with the occasional lazy teacher that to waste
everyone’s time with interminable assessment
exercises that rarely have any good
results. It also has an important effect on
morale. If people are trusted, most will do the
best they can, well beyond the call of duty.
But it they are continually subjected to
assessments and interference they will not feel
trusted, and will react by doing only what
they are legally required to do by their
contract of employment. Since universities,
and indeed all complex organisations, depend
on people doing far more than their
specified duties, this leads to a general breakdown
of trust and efficiency.
The second subject is discipline. This is a
serious problem in many schools, but universities
are almost free from disruptive
behaviour. There were, however, serious
troubles in the nineteen seventies. I recall
visiting the Institute of Physics of the University
of Milan during that period, and
found the walls plastered with Marxist and
Trotskyist proclamations and slogans. The
students demanded to be examined in groups
of twenty, all to receive the same mark. A
whole generation was ruined. Industrialists
receiving applications from these students
immediately rejected them. Some wise parents
removed their sons and daughters and
sent them to schools of higher education in
Switzerland. When they returned to Milan,
such students immediately found jobs.
The following year I went back to Milan,
and the situation was completely different.
The students asked for extra desks in the
corridors to help them to work, and walked
around with books under their arms. The
walls were clean, except for small neat notices
giving information about the forthcoming
meetings of a religious group.
The third subject is truth. This is the
object of education, but its attainment is
being steadily eroded in the name of a false
democracy that maintains that every opinion
is of equal value. This evil is called social
constructivism. I first became aware of this
when I was told that my views on nuclear
power were the result of my support of the
prevailing political-industrial-technological
complex. Opinions are not discussed in relation
to their truth, but ascribed to irrelevant
psychological causes. It is not realized that
years of hard study are necessary before one
has the right to an opinion on highly technical
matters. Editors seem incapable of distinguishing
between correspondents who really
know about a subject and those who just
repeat some political propaganda. They justify
this by saying that everyone has a right
to his opinion. The result is that those who
really know are drowned out and cannot
make their voices heard. This is a serious
defect in our society.
In response to an enquiry by a historian
about how I taught physics, I said that I
simply tried to teach my students the truth
about the natural world. He remarked that
physics must be a very restricted subject. Yes,
I replied, you may re-write history as you
wish, and if you control the mass media no
one will contradict you, but you cannot rewrite
the laws of physics. If you ignore them
you are heading for disaster. The revenge of
reality can be swift and brutal. On one
occasion Marshal Nedelin, the head of the
Soviet intercontinental missile program, was
told by his engineers that a planned launch
should be postponed, as they had found a
malfunction in one of the rocket engines. He
knew that the launch was urgent, since there
was already a ship in the Pacific awaiting the
arrival of the missile, so he ordered the launch
to go ahead. The rocket misfired and he was
immediately incinerated along with about a
hundred technicians. The Chernobyl disaster
also shows what happens when the laws of
physics are ignored.
The evil effects of the mass media are
particularly evident in television. This is
especially worrying because apparently children
spend more time in front of television
than in the classroom. Recently, for example,
there have been two television programs
about scientific subjects that were
gravely misleading. In one of them just one
side of a case was presented, with falsified
data and comments from experts that were
heavily and misleadingly edited. The other
was a program about the research center
CERN and the new hadron collider, full of
computer graphics, but short and misleading
on science. The scientists were furious, but
we can do nothing. The reason is simple: these
programs are devised by people who know
nothing about science and do not bother to
seek advice. They are not interested in truth,
but only in improving their ratings. They
do not know, they do not want to know, and
do not know what knowing means.
Truth is also threatened by the demand for
what is called social relevance, namely that all
scientific research should be directed towards
beneficial applications. Scientists are mainly
supported by the State, so why should they be
allowed to follow their selfish curiosity? They
should work on projects devoted to achieve
some practical purpose. Such a demand can
only be made by one who is completely
ignorant of scientific research, and who
thinks that scientists can predict the results of
their work. Nevertheless, it is now usual for
applicants for research funding to be required
to state the social benefits expected
from the research. In self-preservation, scientists
become adept at concocting silly stories
about how their research will benefit humanity.
This is little better than the scientists in
Soviet Russia who had to preface their papers
with fulsome tributes to the genius of Stalin
whose brilliant ideas inspired their work.
This requirement of social relevance shows
complete ignorance of the nature of scientific
research and its relations to technology. Scientific
research is driven by its own inner
criteria, not by external needs. Furthermore,
it is impossible to foresee the results of research.
Rutherford in 1936 declared that he
could see no more than small-scale applications
of nuclear physics. If Roentgen had
been told to improve methods of medical
diagnosis, he might have invented a new
type of probe. Instead he was studying, out of
pure curiosity, electrical discharges in gases
and he discovered X-rays. Madame Curie
studied radioactivity and discovered radium.
One famous scientist said that if anyone in his
laboratory said that he was doing his research
to benefit mankind he would immediate
throw him out, for such research is bound to
be mediocre at best.
Truth is also weakened in many countries
by the demand for preferential access. This
means that applicants for academic or commercial
posts are assessed not only on their
technical competence, but on racial and
sexual criteria as well. This is gravely weakening
universities and indeed the whole of
society. This social engineering is, however,
limited by the demands of reality. In one
country I know well, the only posts for which
criteria of technical excellence are rigorously
applied are those of surgeons and airline
pilots. Even the most rabid revolutionary
wants to be operated on by a surgeon who
knows what he is doing, and to fly in an
aircraft with a reliable pilot. Similarly the
physicists in the Soviet Union were less
persecuted by the party apparatchiks than
other scientists because they knew that their
criteria are not susceptible to ideological
manipulation.
Taken together, these three failings of our
education system pose a serious threat to
society. We are faced with life-threatening,
indeed civilization-threatening perils such as
the energy crisis, global warming, and worldwide
pollution. The first requirement for any
reasonable discussion is a knowledge of the
facts available. Even if we had such knowledge,
the necessary decisions would be hard
and painful. Without it, we are walking
blindfold into disaster.