'Teaching Physics as one of the humanities': The history of (harvard) project Physics, 1961-1970

In the United States after World War II, science had come to occupy a central place in the minds of policy makers, scientists, and the public. Negotiating different views between these groups proved a difficult task and spilled into debates over the role and scope of science education. To examine this process, this dissertation traces the history of Harvard Project Physics (HPP), a high-school physics curriculum from the 1960s that incorporated a humanistic and historical approach to teaching science. The narrative begins with the rise of General Education in the 1940s. Under the leadership of Harvard president James Conant, faculty at Harvard developed several Natural Science courses that connected science to history as a way to teach students about science and its relationship to culture. By the late 1950s this historical approach faced resistance from scientists who viewed it as misrepresenting their disciplines and called for students to learn specialized subject matter. With the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), in the early 1960s scientists' vision of science education emerged in high-school classrooms across the country. By the mid 1960s, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the Daddario Amendment to the NSF, the political and education landscape began to change. These laws transformed the goals of two of the NSF and the Office of Education (USOE). These organizations faced demands to work together to develop projects that would speak to domestic concerns over equity and diversity. Their first joint educational venture was HPP. In order to succeed, HPP had to speak to the needs of disciplinary-minded scientists at the NSF, equity-minded educators at the USOE, and results-focused politicians in Congress. This work argues that HPP succeeded because it met the needs of these various stakeholders regarding the roles of science and education in American society.