Why do schools only teach the math part of physics but never explain the theories that math contributed to?

I remember being in year 9 at school being so excited to do physics. I used to watch a lot of vsauce videos and I really enjoyed understanding the concepts and ideas behind the theories of how the universe works. But it took me about 2 months before I realised it was just going to be doing a bunch of equations for the next 3 years without ever being shown how these equations were used to come up with theories and ideas that people like vsauce were able to explain so well.

Don’t get me wrong I understand why the math is taught. You can’t have a deep understanding of physics without having a good foundation. But almost none of those equations were ever used for things other than memory recollection. We had 20ish equations to remember for our exams, and yet I don’t ever recall ever having a lesson on key scientific figures like Einstein Newton or Hawking and how they changed physics. I guarantee 90% of my class still probably don’t know how significant their work actually is.

And let’s be real here, out of every classroom only a handful at most will pursue physics, and that’s being quite generous imo. Kids won’t need a good foundation unless they pursue it. Wouldn’t it make more sense to expose kids to the cool ideas that hooked people like me in the first place and then slowly start building the maths and explaining the math behind the theories when it’s needed? At least then you might even get kids interested in learning instead of just throwing equations at them. Looking back the reason why vsauce was able to hook me in is because he almost never touched the math, he was always more about explaining the general idea.

I’m not saying don’t include maths, you will need to eventually, but if I can understand the basics of the theory of relativity just from speed = distance/time and basic knowledge about acceleration and gravity just from a 15 minute YouTube video, I’m sure that would’ve made physics a lot more interesting to study.

Submitted January 26, 2023 at 10:34PM by TheOnlyJoe_ https://ift.tt/eUgaE5Y