The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America (1963)

I came to the US for college from Asia to study physics (and mathematics). I actually came to study astronomy because I found it fascinating but didn't really like physics or math. My first physics encounter in college here transformed my life. There was no memorization. Instead, we had short quizzes in each class (first 5 min), weekly individual assignments, weekly group assignments (two students each), four "midterms" where one could get densely written "cheat-sheets" as well as weekly physics lab that often went on far beyond the time slot.

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.

I was just thinking about this earlier today when washing my hands in the sink.

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!

For those interested in a kind of retrospective about 40 years after Feynman's speech, read "Physics in Latin America Comes of Age" (published in 2000) by José Luis Morán‐López:

> 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.

Its crazy he thinks that learning physics is the solution: I believe that in the improvement of the technical ability, thus the productivity, of the people of Latin America lies the source of real economic advancement.

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

Speaking from Uruguay, this characterization feels outdated. Our public universities emphasize problem-solving, experimentation, and strong theoretical foundations, and they produce graduates who work globally in engineering, physics, and software.

Programs like Plan Ceibal normalized hands-on computing early on, and there’s a healthy connection between academia, industry, and research institutes. Brain drain exists everywhere, but it’s no longer accurate to describe countries like Uruguay as stuck in rote learning or disconnected from real-world application. Latin America isn’t monolithic, and some of these critiques reflect a 1960s snapshot more than today’s reality.

It's been many decades since I read it, but there was some mention of this in Feynman's first autobiography (Surely You're Joking). He described learning about the problem and investigating the root cause, which is also described in this speech. (The root cause was a focus on the memorization of scattered facts vs. making students understand the subject matter.)

A story told from an old school Russian professor about physics at the university of Moscow under Stalin:

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.“

> This, along with the fact that salaries are absurdly low, shows a lack of interest by the Brazilian government, people, and industry, in the development of science in this country.

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.

This problem is not limited to Latin America or physics alone - it also affects regions such as Africa. For example, many students at universities in Senegal, do not find employment after graduating. Some drop out earlier once they realize their prospects are slim, while others try their luck in Western countries.

This resonated with my own experience: exams rewarded recall, not understanding. I only really “earned physics when I started building things and breaking them. Curious how others here learned to move from memorization to intuition.

The problem of teaching physics in Latin America is only part of the wider problem of teaching physics anywhere. In fact, it is part of the problem of teaching anything anywhere – a problem for which there is no known satisfactory solution.

Even though Feynman wrote this based on his experience in Latin America, i think this is true of many (most?) countries even today.

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.

It is interesting to interpret how the above is still applicable in the current technological hoopla of AI/LLMs capabilities.

What do the students know that is not easily and directly available in a book? The things that can be looked up in a book are only a part of knowledge. Who wants such a student to work in a plant when a book requiring no food or maintenance stands day after day always ready to give just as adequate answers? Who wants to be such a student, to have worked so hard, to have missed so much of interest and pleasure, and to be outdone by an inanimate printed list of "laws"?

> It is not economically sound to continuously import technically‑skilled people

Interesting take.

G.I Gurdjieff, in Meetings With Remarkable People references the present civilization, where a "The Conversation of the Two Sparrows" concerns the European's scope of wisdom in mathematical knowledge, whereas the Asiatic understands contemporary knowledge "not by knowing but by being."

'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."

Fast-forward to 2025.

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

The recipe for disaster.

Read this from HN in 2011, was interesting. But I take Feynman's conclusions with the grain of salt, and most comments here are near conspiracy theories. Here's why.

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, money shouldn't be a big problem, they're spending smaller share of GDP on education. But modern beliefs tell that everything should be "efficient", and governments don't want to spend more, instead they insist they need to "digitize" education, and then somehow it will make breakthroughs.)

But also, if you want to play god and pour money from the education ministry into schools or colleges/unis, these streams may actually never reach the file and rank teachers.

Last note: elite school/uni material won't work in lower level ones. I taught in the university where some graduation projects were published in journals for young researchers, and teachers were publishing in not top ranking, but high ranking serious ones. Some courses included work on good older papers (in English, a foreign language).

There, you could easily dismiss students who just want a grade and a degree as noise.

But take a city further from the capitals -- even in good college students will struggle and not able to process it. Not because further on the periphery people are dumber -- simply because most brightest students went to the best unis in the capitals.

In the elites, it's easy to argue to shrink education to keep only the bright guys, like in the XIX century. Well, it doesn't work this way -- you need to educate lots of people to find more bright ones.

So, who, what and how will teach those less bright guys? A big open question to me.

Previously:

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