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Well, as one whose experience is now all too close to 30 years, I have to
point out that having degrees and applying for positions, etc. has little
to do with the measures referred to in the quoted passage. We recently had
a search which yielded about 350 applicants, but these applicants are from
a pool that consists of less than 1% of all the people who have ever had
physics instruction in their lives.
The reason that we see so many applicants per position is not that the
world is swamped by the successes of our instruction, but that there are so
few positions available (and we have fax and word processing to support the
enterprise of making applications.) A case *might* even be made that there
are so few positions available is another possible measure attributable to
a kind of failure of the educational responsibilities of our profession.
It strikes me that when we do consider the numbers (I generated a
calculation last year of relative numbers of student-instruction-hours in
physics, teachers and students at all levels, elementary, middle/jr, high
school, college non-majors, college and graduate majors.), suggesting that
those who become physics majors might have done much of what they have
accomplished in spite of us in intro classes (HS & College) is hard to
dismiss on numbers alone. Less than 1% of all people who receive physics
instruction become physicists.
The one thing learned by 99+% of all who have some physics instruction and
probably the only lasting thing measured as surviving decades is NOT
anything from the canon of physics, instead it is that:
A simple place to begin, as far as I'm concerned, would be to reserve the
vocational training strictly for physics and engineering majors and for
everyone else (K - 12) and college non-science majors develop courses in
which the *students'* understanding concerning the *phenomena* are the
object of attention. I think even the physics and engineering majors would
be all the better for this approach of partitioning the thrust of courses
at the different levels.