CHICAGO – Throughout the West, declining standards in science education are threatening future prosperity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the West has depended on technical innovation and scientific derring-do for its influence and growth. But the West now faces serious competition from the rising nations of Asia, where education in math and science is flourishing.

In general, competition in science and technology is a blessing – the more advanced a nation is, the better a customer it is. And collaboration and exchange of people make for profitable businesses and higher standards of living. But it must be recognized that falling educational standards will eventually hit economic growth.

The West, particularly the United States, has lived through such a moment of recognition before, when the USSR launched Sputnik in 1957. The so-called “Sputnik shock” convinced America and the West of the need for radical reform of science education, particularly recruitment, training, and retention of teachers.

One reform that demands priority today concerns high school science. Mathematics, the foundation for all science, depends on its concise language and logical ordering. Physics, once the subject most dependent on mathematics, provides knowledge about the structure of atoms, and the use of mathematics there has now spread to chemistry and biology. Essentially all phenomena in chemistry find explanations in the quantum atom, while chemistry and physics undergird molecular biology, which, since the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, dominates modern biology. All other sciences – geology, astronomy, neuroscience, oceanography, and myriad hyphenated subjects – depend upon overlapping combinations of biology, chemistry, and physics.

Yet today, the vast majority of high schools start the study of science with biology. In America, the requirement is usually for three years of science study, and, today, most U.S. students take science in this order: biology, chemistry, physics. This sequence of study was devised in 1893. I believe that it is obsolete, pedagogically disastrous, and ignores the tremendous scientific advances of the twentieth century. Other industrial nations may cycle through pieces of the disciplines, missing the essential coherence of the P-C-B sequence.

Studying science should begin with physics, not biology. In studying physics, students study algebra simultaneously, motivating them with a sense of the power of mathematics. Moreover, physics begins with everyday phenomena requiring few new words (as opposed to conventional ninth-grade biology): motion, velocity, acceleration, falling objects, a sense of gravity as a force, and some new concepts, e.g. mass, momentum, and energy, but with crisp definitions.

Ninth-grade physics, unlike ninth-grade biology, illustrates the grand sweep of the laws of nature, and the power of an equation to describe a vast number of different phenomena can be taught at this level. Classroom experiments make use of simple laboratory devices: inclined planes, pulleys, springs, simple pendulums, but the rules that are revealed have validity out in the real world. The fall of a weight (or an apple!) can be connected to the moon’s orbit around the earth and even to the structure of galaxies holding billions of solar systems.

Indeed, we can study, on a convenient classroom scale, the same forces that move atoms and planets. The last month or more of ninth-grade physics introduces atoms, invisible to the naked eye but with strong indirect support. Here physics introduces scales of distances, atoms to galaxies, scales of time, nanoseconds to centuries, and scales of energy from electron volts to megajoules. These orders of magnitude require metaphors and repetition, but they serve as crucial concepts in our world, especially in cosmology and in evolutionary biology.

Tenth-grade chemistry makes use of ninth-grade physics, deepening and enriching the student’s grasp, but no basic chemical or biological principles are required for ninth-grade physics. Instead, qualitative applications of physics to chemistry and biology heighten interest and emphasize the connections. Chemistry is largely a study of molecules, and when they are complex, there is the mysterious transition to life and biology.

At all stages of the science curriculum, basic questions must be asked. How does something work? How do we know? What are the common laws? It was not a physicist, but a biologist, Julius Meyer, who first proposed the law of conservation of energy from a study of biological energy processes. The chemist Dalton first gave a proof of the existence of atoms and the engineer Sadi Carnot first gave a proof of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The sequence Physics-Chemistry-Biology implies that continuous collegial professional development for teachers is essential. Teachers (including those in mathematics) should meet regularly to plot the evolution of their courses, their essential coherence, and the inclusion of stories that illustrate how science works. Teachers need time to talk together.

I know of more than 1,000 high schools that have implemented the P-C-B sequence. There is almost universal joy as students begin to grasp the whole picture. Elective science courses zoom up in popularity. Because this sequence is for all students, what will be retained in the future are the stories and, most importantly, a scientific way of thinking. There is no job, no profession, civic activity that will not profit from this kind of education.

But to restore the vitality of science, we need to look at the entire educational system: teachers from pre-school through high school, state and national standards, productive and educationally reinforcing assessments, teaching materials and educational technology, and progress in the neurosciences, cognitive psychology, developmental biology, and nutrition. And leadership for this huge revolutionary effort will probably have to come from visionary business executives whose profits depend on education and rationality.