Massachusetts Institute of Technology Oral History Program, oral history interviews on the Physical Science Study Committee

The Physical Science Study Committee, and its subsequent offshoots, Educational Services Incorporated (ESI) and Education Development Center (EDC), sought to achieve a comprehensive change in the teaching of science, particularly physics at its inception, in the secondary school system. The genesis of the original committee was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1956 with a project initiated by Jerrold Zacharias, James Killian, and Francis Friedman.

James Killian, MIT President (1948-1959), President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology (1957-1959), and key developer of NASA, summarized the influence of this committee’s work in his memoir, The Education of a College President: “Out of [the Physical Science Study Committee] was to come a revolutionary physics course for high schools, and in fact a curriculum reform movement with worldwide impact in which first-rate scholars in our universities turned their creative attention to the development of better teaching in precollege schools. I had the privilege of participating in this process by enthusiastically supporting Professor Zacharias’s initial concept and by running interference for him in launching and funding the PSSC program.”(1) The chapter in which this remark appears, “Trailbreaking in Education: Two Exemplars,” provides an account of the history of the Physical Science Study Committee.

The history of the project itself is well documented in the records of the Physical Science Study Committee and its offshoots (MC 79, MC 626). The oral history sought to bolster the documentation of this committee dynamically through interviews with Jerrold Zacharias, Philip Morrison, Jack Churchill, Nathaniel Frank. and other central figures.

According to Marc S. Miller, one of the primary interviewers of the project, the oral history of the Physical Science Study Committee was intended to document, through interviews with the principal participants, the “inception, philosophy, growth and subsequent off-shoots [of the Physical Science Study Committee], and its impact on curriculum reform.”

The collection provides extensive background material on both the process of the Physical Science Study Committee oral history project and the Physical Science Study Committee itself.

The collection consists of the transcripts of the interviews with principal members of the Physical Science Study Committee, background and reference materials relating to the individual interviewees, and the history of the Committee. Also included is a substantial amount of notes taken by the interviewers. These notes can be found in box 4, included in the interviewee folders. ______ (1) James R. Killian, Jr., The Education of a College President: A Memoir (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 167.