Feynman's Critique of Brazilian Physics Education

In his O Americno Outra Ves, the well-known scientist Richard Feynman writes about his experience from traveling to Brazil and sitting in on and teaching in university physics classes. Feynman becomes increasingly unimpressed with Brazil’s higher education as his travels continue. Feynman tells of a class he taught earlier on where students were unable to answer questions that related to concepts, but were perfectly capable of giving textbook definitions of the same concepts. Students there had been given the exact definition of physical laws and properties to memorize, but no more than that. Feynman reacts with, “I didn’t see how they were going to learn anything from that,” (Feynman 55). Feynman firmly believed it was unlikely that the students

Although I disagree with Feynman’s very crude style of criticizing the school’s system of teaching, I whole heartedly agree with his idea of how physics has to be taught, hands on. During my high school senior year, I took AP Physics. Due to scheduling issues, I had to take the course as an independent study instead of with a class. This decision disabled me to be in the labs that are meant to work in tangent with the curriculum and reinforce the content and concepts we were taught. I was very capable of giving definitions and explaining ideas that we studied in the class; however, I was almost helpless when I was asked to state an example representing a concept we learned. This situation was greatly intensified when the AP Exam came around last spring, where I received a very unsatisfactory score for my standards. I can empathize to Feynman’s frustration with students who were unable to articulate the ins and outs of concepts that physics students should have known. Feynman wrote, “I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question– the same subject, and the same question as far as I could tell- they couldn’t answer it at all,” (Feynman 54). Feynman described a situation where he asked what polarization was, to which students could give a near textbook definition. When Feynman asked a more specific question, asking for a real world example of polarization, the students were silent and confused. I know the feeling of not fully being able to relate scientific concepts due to not being properly education through lecture as well as experimentation. I do think that the way Feynman lays out his opinions of the Brazilian form of “education” was a bit brash. I can give him the credit that he was one of the most well-known and respected scientists of the 20th century. I am unsure of how welcomed and powerful he was to the