Charts, maps, and reports play a large part in all of this work, as the familiar progressive school formula of learning by doing is constantly applied. But the students are not merely following rote plans; they are actually recreating, in many cases, the actual processes of discovery, especially in astronomy and geography.
Other Courses
They do not spend all their time on this program, of course. In the eighth grade it takes twelve fifty minute periods per week. Meanwhile the Walden students are taking a general language course which brings them the basic ideas of languages, speech, formation, cognate patterns, etc., a basic American history course including a study of current events, and an English course. Furthermore, within the science course, attention is drawn to the implications of science for society. For example, in the study of the development of the ancient idea of the year, it is shown that a stable society was required to keep the records needed to fix a year's duration. Again, some idea of the growing complexity of human thought is shown in the study of the increasingly sophisticated calendars of the various ancient societies and their alteration into the modern one.
In the ninth grade, the first topic considered is the formation of the earth, and various concepts, like those of LaPlace and Jeans, are dealt with. While the subject is not exhausted, the general idea is left of a mass of gas contracting to form the solar system.
Chemistry Developed
The previous year's chemistry is developed still further and simple three-element compounds are learned, like silicates, carbonates, acids, bases, and salts, and thus they are able to examine what happened as the earth cooled and the rocks were formed.
Different kinds of rocks and different geologic processes up to continent formation follow, and after them comes an examination of how key biochemical compounds, like carbohydrates, hydrocarbons, amino acids, and proteins are formed.
The next unity is biology--a brief study of evolution from the single cell up to the mammal. Geology is brought in again to tie things together, as the various geologic eras provide a frame for locating different developments in evolution. And geology furnishes a good transition to studies of skeletons and dermal structure, for the evidence of these is founds in rocks. The ten main phyla are studied, with special emphasis on the chordates, and particular attention to the mammals. A study of the reproductive process in mammals provides an effective sex education.
About halfway through the ninth grade the Walden students are ready to study man, but they do so first not as historians but as physical anthropologists, noting those details in his physical development, like prehensile grasp, stereoptican view, speech, and erect posture, which distinguish him from other primates.
Primitive Cultures
They then consider the development of primitive cultures, not only in the general terms of the technology and social organization of paleolithic and neolithic cultures, but also by examining a few specific societies, like the Aranda of Australia, the Hopi, the Kazakhs of Central Asia, the Haida Indians off the West Coast of Canada, the Ganda of Uganda and finally the Inca. They consider in a fairly sophisticated manner just what makes a civilization, and how the primitive forms developed.
The last period in the ninth grade is spent in a consideration of ancient history--from the Sumerians through the kingdoms of Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia, the Hebrews, the Minoans of Crete, the Persian Empire, and the Greek city states down to the victory of Philip of Macedon in 338 B.C.
Continuity Maintained
This essentially, is the end of the program as it now stands. But subsequent grades do not ignore the groundwork that has been laid. Mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology courses all pick up where the students have left off before. History courses go on through the sixteenth century in the tenth grade, and through the Puritan Revolution, the development of constitutions, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in the eleventh grade. With this background, the twelfth grade in the first term again goes over U. S. history from 1789 to 1917, and in the second studies the U. S. and the world from 1917 to the present.
At Walden the program has had the benefit of some exceptional, versatile teachers, and that is obviously a large part of the battle in any educational program. But Augustus Pigman, one of the teachers who has helped to develop it, argues that only good, interested teachers are necessary to make the program succeed, and he hopes that other institutions will copy the Walden program.
Time will be necessary to assess this curriculum's long-run effects, for it has been in complete operation in the eighth and ninth grades for only three years and is only just now being expanded into the tenth grade. It has had seven years of experiment in the eighth grade and as an idea its history is much older than that.
But even now it is clear that all the students are quite excited about science and are going out and buying telescopes or constructing homemade instruments of one sort or another. And the kids interested in science do not scorn history, nor are they likely to concentrate on only one kind of science, for they see the importance of a wide range of understanding. The early returns, including a Walden junior who has just been admitted to the class of 1962 here, are most encouraging for this new program.