The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America (1963)

There is no "True Education" anymore, only the appearance of one with the sole aim of churning out a "Productive Worker"(for a certain definition of the term) for a Economy; no understanding required.

Richard Feynman on education in Brazil - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483976 - April 2011 (73 comments)

The same problems still exist, exacerbated by the prevalence of LLMs and no detection mechanisms whatsoever.

The recipe for disaster.

and not the fact that the US has spent 150+ years destabilizing that part of the world.

Education in the older epoch that his informers mention, was much smaller in scale. Brazil's illiteracy was at ~65% in 1930, at just <50% by 1960, if I remember correctly. So both common schools and secondary education (college/university) were expanding at the time. And that's the reason.

If you expand education, quality inevitably drops. The lower social strata that are reached by education won't get as good teachers as earlier. You may be able to write good schoolbooks, like mathematicians in the USSR did, but there's still last mile problem, the teacher. Most teachers are not bright enthusiasts, often times they're underpaid and burnt out after ages of teaching. The few enthusiasts and visionaries, are exceptions -- at least this is what I read from one recent study -- and their recipies aren't reproducible.

From what I've read, better universities usually have less students per teacher. This way a teacher can engage better and actually care what the student does. This requires more money poured in the system and less corruption. For non-Western countries, this actually shouldn't be a big problem, they're spending smaller share of GDP on education.

No, it shows that the country is poor - the desire to pay higher salaries was always there, but it's hard. People in rich countries think money grows on trees because for them, it kind of does.

And this is why development advice from "intellectuals" in rich countries is worthless.

It’s exam. The professor enters the room and tells students there will be 3 exams.

One extremely hard all books allowed, it’s either pass with top grade or fail, nothing in between.

One hard, one book allowed, it’s either pass with moderate grade or fail, nothing in between.

One moderate, no book allowed, but if you know the books you can pass, it’s passing grade or fail.

Students are told to sort according to the exam they want to take. Very hard to the right, hard in the middle, moderate to the left.

Once students are sorted the professor says: „ Right pass. Middle come back next year. Left go home, Russia does not need you.“

'In this anecdote it is said that once upon a time on the cornice of a high horse sat two sparrows, one old, the other young.'

'They were discussing an event which had become the "burning question of the day" among the sparrows, and which had resulted from the mullah's housekeeper having just previously thrown out of a window, on to a place where the sparrows gathered to play, something looking like left-over porridge, but which turned out to be chopped cork; and several of the young and yet inexperienced sparrow sat, almost burst.'

'While talking about the old sparrow, suddenly ruffling himself up, began with a pained grimace to search under his wing for the fleas tormenting him, and which in general breed on underfed sparrows; and having caught one, he said with a deep sigh:

'"Times have changed very much -- there is no longer a living to be had for our fraternity.

'"In the old days we used to sit, just as now, somewhere upon a roof, quietly dozing, when suddenly down in the street there would be heard a noise, a rattling and a rumbling, and soon after an odour would be diffused, at which everything inside us would begin to rejoice; because we felt fully certain that when we flew down and searched the places where all that happened, we would find satisfaction for our essential needs.

'"But nowadays there is plenty and to spare of noise and rattlings, and all sorts of rumblings, and again and again an odour is also diffused, but an odour which it is almost impossible to endure; and when sometimes, by force of old habit, we fly down during a moment's lull to seek something substantial for ourselves, then seach as we may with tense attention, we find nothing at all except some nauseous drops of burned oil."

> At the end of the 20th century, a large “science gap” still exists between Latin America and the developed countries of the North.

> The description is not intended to be a complete analysis, but may give a sense of the significant development that has occurred in the past half century and of what might be needed to make the 21st century a flourishing epoch for science in Latin America .

> The most developed group includes Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, which have, respectively, about 3000, 2200, and 2000 PhDs involved in physics research.

https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/physics-in-latin-ameri...

https://aip.brightspotcdn.com/PTO.v53.i10.38_1.online.pdf

Feynman, of course, always had confidence in the ability of the people of Latin America to do good physics. In fact his mentor Manuel Sandoval Vallarta was born in Mexico and emigrated to the US to study at MIT. Emigration to the US or Europe is typical of successful physicists from Latin America, including Juan Maldacena, a theorist from Argentina who discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence and has been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2001.

Anecdotally, I think Europe has more opportunities these days. My friend Gustavo, a high energy theorist from Brazil, got his PhD in the US but now works at the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics (OKC) in Stockholm.

When you first turn on the hot water tap in most homes, the water that comes out is cold. After some period of time, hotter water starts to come out. My mom used to describe this as "waiting for the water to warm up".

For decades, I didn't consider the mechanism behind this. That is that there is water in the pipes between the home water heater and the tap. That water can't retain its heat without any further heat input, and gradually loses heat and comes into near-equilibrium with the temperature of the rest of the house. The hot water inside the water heater tank, on the other hand, is constantly being reheated as necessary by a heating element.

When you turn on the tap, after not having used it for some time, you're waiting for cold water from the pipes to be flushed out through the tap and be replaced with freshly heated water from the tank. Once this happens, the water coming out of the tap will be hot because it's been heated recently enough.

I probably didn't realize this until I was about 30 years old, and then I thought of Feynman's anecdote of his students not connecting their theoretical knowledge to understand the mechanism of a real physical situation. It seems I wasn't curious enough as a child to apply my own knowledge to the mechanism of the hot water tap!

In high school, physics was mostly based on memorization. There were a few problems but all based on some patterns. None made you think extremely hard.

I also found that many American students (who were extremely good in my experience) seemed to have a much better practical sense.

One of the key steps in the development of a physicist is the transition from solving textbook problems to creating your own problems. In essence, the skill one learns in graduate school is defining/crafting problems that are solvable and interesting. The primordial phase starts in college as one is solving many problems. Initially, the new problems are straightforward extensions of existing ones (e.g. add an air resistance term for parabolic motion). Eventually, one (hopefully) develops good taste and essentially is doing research.

Interestingly, I also find very different attitudes to physics in the west (at least in the US) and other parts of the world. In US universities, physics is still seen in glowing terms. In many other places, physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering. Young people (well, all people) are impressionable and this subtle bias affects what kind of students end up studying the subject.

For him to move from math to electrical engineering to physics in Brazil would mean going through this twice. This might make him take some 7 or 8 years to graduate.

I guess this inflexibility makes things easier for the administrators. They know they will have 25 students in the statistics class in 2028 and so know how many teachers to hire to handle that.

Interesting take.

But, since then, Brazil became again a lot more agrarian. Manufacturing is now about 13% of GNP. During all this time of growth and fall of the need for technically trained people teaching and learning in Brazil didn't improve that much.

What Feynman doesn't see is culture, or the plain lack of it. People simply don't care to know that science and rigorous knowledge exist. Very much like rural people in the U.S., most Brazilians are immersed in a tribal religious culture that is suspicious of science and education. That country had a president that, while 700 000 people died of Covid, was campaigning against vaccines, saying that those deaths were not his problem and promoting quack medicine.

The "problem" is simply culture: Latin Americans are just plain ignorant people that don't want to learn science.