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Paul F. Brandwein (1912–1994) was a publisher, author, teacher, scientist, and environmentalist. Born an Austrian with Spanish and Basque roots, Brandwein emigrated to the United States before World War II. After emigrating, during summers, when he was not teaching, Brandwein traveled to Europe to work with British and American intelligence. He later became a major United States publisher and educator, who came to be professionally at home at the podium and in laboratories, classrooms, the boardrooms of the publishing industry, scientific societies, and education associations. During the course of his long, distinguished, varied career, he worked productively as a scientist, an author, an educator (grade school to graduate school), an editor and publisher, and an environmentalist (a noun he preferred to the less inclusive term, “conservationist”). In the service of science and education, he delivered almost a thousand speeches to audiences worldwide.

Brandwein’s wide-ranging publications concern the humanities, science, and education. His first published essay of hundreds, along with more than 50 books in several languages, appeared in 1937. His last book, ‘’Science Talent in the Young Expressed Within Ecologies of Achievement’’, was published posthumously in 1995 by the National Research Council on the Gifted and Talented. Over the course of his 82 years, he was author or coauthor of many papers, books, and textbooks in science and science education, particularly in relation to the science shy, the science prone, the science talented, the gifted, and the disadvantaged. He also published widely in the humanities and the social sciences.

Although childhood arthritis cut short Brandwein’s formal piano studies, as many of his listening audiences would later testify, he never gave up the piano as avocation. He often broke up his talks by sitting down to the keyboard to emphasize analogies between music, science, art, and teaching and learning.

As a young man, while being treated in hospitals, Brandwein became interested in science, and his professional focus changed from music to biology. Shortly thereafter, a hospital chemist sponsored him as an assistant in the Littauer Pneumonia Research Laboratory (New York). While working at Littauer during the 1930s, Brandwein completed his BS, Phi Beta Kappa, from New York University in night, afternoon, and summer classes. During those years, he was cited as author or coauthor on several research papers.

Thus, before beginning his doctoral studies, Brandwein spent four years observing and assisting in research on the biochemistry of pneumococcus. His practical experience at Littauer in what he would come to call “the well-ordered empiricism of research” (including the processes and protocols of problem finding and solving) focused on the microecology of protists and the ecology of host-plant fungus relationships. By the time he earned his master's degree (1937) and doctorate (1940), both also from New York University, he had come to a belief, based in his own experience, that would be lifelong: The best way to encourage the young in science was to help them early to do original work. And the best way to help that happen was through mentoring.

Brandwein took his obligation to serve as a mentor to those who chose him and whom he chose as seriously as his many other duties. Those he advised ranged from any vulnerable child whose path crossed his, to the high school students he taught at mid-century (some of whom went on to become major American scientists including award-winning theoretical physicist Andrew Sessler, humanitarian, and former director of the Berkeley Lab (1973-1980) who founded both the Earth Sciences and what is now the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University Richard Lewontin, and James P. Friend,  R. S. Hanson Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry Emeritus at Drexel University, to his colleagues in publishing at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, where he concluded his career as copublisher, to “anyone,” at any age, he found worthy and in need of help.

After the war, in the late 1940s, Brandwein and his wife moved into the Orange County (New York) farmhouse where they lived for most of the rest of their lives. Although professional demands would in the future frequently take him away from Sun Hill Farm, it was to this haven of pastoral and forested lands to which he would always return. There, on the surrounding acres, Brandwein established extensive gardens and an arboretum and continued his botanical research on rusts and smuts. The property is now home to the Paul F-Brandwein Institute, an organization committed to students, teachers, scientists, historians, staff, and volunteers interested in environment and natural systems (see the Wikipedia entry on the Institute’s current president, Keith A. Wheeler).

Brandwein taught first at George Washington High School (New York) and then, between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s, first as a member and later as chair of the science department, at Forest Hills High School (also New York). There, Brandwein instituted a program where students could select themselves to do original work in science. According to John Curtis Gowan and George D. Demos, more of Brandwein's early students — who studied in a heterogeneous American public school, not a specialized one training mathematicians and scientists — won the Westinghouse (now Intel) Science Talent Search than those of any other teacher. Gowan and Demos wrote that

His record of National Science Talent Search winners is unchallenged in the nation, but so modest is he that this fact could never be deduced from his writings. While his own character and personality have much to do with the successes of his students, and his method cannot be communicated completely to less able teachers, it will still pay us handsomely to examine in detail his procedures as seen in his excellent book The Gifted Student as Future Scientist…. (1955, p. 118)

The research Brandwein completed on students' progress toward science came out in 1955 as The Gifted Student as Future Scientist and was republished in 1981. Until the National Science Teachers Association in 1989 published Gifted Young in Science: Potential Through Performance, which he coedited with A. Harry Passow, Brandwein's 1955/1981 volume was the only one devoted to suggesting means to encourage students to develop gifts in science.

A gifted teacher and mentor himself, Brandwein was convinced by William Jovanovich that he could make a bigger difference in American education by writing, editing, and publishing both textbooks and other volumes than by working with individual students in individual classrooms, and he therefore turned to publishing. Before and during his development of curriculum and instructional materials, Brandwein's publishing career was flourishing. He became president of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's Center for the Study of Instruction (San Francisco) and its director of Research in Curriculum and Instruction; later, he was director and editor-in-chief of the School Division; finally, he was copublisher of Research-Based Publications. Among his most widely distributed books were those making up the series Concepts in Science, best-selling, grade-specific texts published by Harcourt, Brace, and World (and later by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) that transformed the teaching of science in U.S. schools not only by making available scientific knowledge that many teachers from the primary through high school levels lacked, but also by providing kits containing materials that allowed students to “do” science, not just read about it or listen to lectures on it.

In spite of the success of these texts, Brandwein was well aware of the limitations of the lecture-textbook, laid-out laboratories process, which his many classroom visits taught him were the norm in American science education. Partially because of this concern, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he joined other scientists and educators nationwide on the Sputnik science project, which worked to change science education in response to that “educational crisis” — one, Brandwein drily noted, of a continuous and recurrent series. He served on the Steering Committee of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), as chair of its Gifted Student Committee, and as consultant to the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC). These committees developed programs of what Brandwein called “originative” inquiry designed to interest high school students in science.

Profoundly committed to the American vision of education for all and considering the equal treatment of unequals both unfair and absurd, Brandwein worked especially to improve circumstances for the two groups of children whose needs he felt were most neglected — the disadvantaged and the gifted. “We do pretty well for the 80 percent of the students in the middle,” he once said. “But the 10 percent at the top and the bottom: We grind them under our feet!” The cornerstone of his philosophy was deeply democratic: He believed all young should be given equal access to opportunity, so that those who freely chose, not merely those who tested well, could select themselves for the original work, through which — in science as in any field — they could discover their talent. “One is not gifted,” Brandwein believed “until one has given a gift. A creative person does a work; a gifted person may never do one,” continuing, “A gifted person is a promissory note; [s/]he must give a gift, do a work, to become creative. [S/]he is a cashier’s check when [s/]he becomes creative.”

Believing, as he put it, that “the value of a person's advice about teaching is inversely proportional to the square of the distance he or she is away from the classroom” Brandwein visited in the course of 30 years classes in about 600 schools and interviewed some 120 administrators and some 2,000 teachers in America and on four other continents to observe teaching and learning first hand. Brandwein's sense of humor and humility informed his refusal not to lecture but to teach; however, it did not undercut his gentle but unwavering commitment to his fundamental mission: The best education takes place when an “ecology of achievement” results as “the school-community ecosystem acts in mutualism with cultural and university ecosystems” (1995, p. 115).

Brandwein's research in this area culminated in ‘’Memorandum: On Renewing Schooling and Education’’ (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981). There and throughout his career Brandwein emphasized that “education” is made up of much more than “schooling,” a distinction that goes back as far as Plato, whose view of education gave only passing attention to schools; he did not equate schooling with education. Indeed, for him, and for scholars in the centuries following, schooling was a useful part, but certainly not all, of education. It was, Plato insisted, the community that educated, that shaped mind and character, vocation and avocation. (1981, p. 10)

Brandwein noted that he rarely found an effective school in a poor neighborhood or a severely flawed one in an affluent area. Failed educational ecologies, he noted, should not be blamed on teachers:
 * We ask of them . . . everything.
 * We pay them . . . nothing.
 * And we give them . . . dark and dreary scoldings.
 * And we give them . . . dark and dreary scoldings.

Brandwein's visits to schools where he observed classes and met with science teachers and administrators again and again saddened him that the teachers had so much to do — run lunchrooms, monitor halls, oversee recess, fill out forms — that they had almost no time to live much less to do their own work. In the welter of demands, they rarely had the time to give specially interested students the care they needed. In spite of the odds stacked against teachers, however, many succeeded splendidly: Teaching remains, he said, “a personal invention. It is a performing art. It is a mercy. Teachers help students cross their Rubicons. We are the last line of defense against meaninglessness, against chaos.”

Though not formally professionally affiliated with a single college or university, Brandwein was no stranger to higher education, speaking, consulting, and teaching at many graduate and undergraduate institutions nationwide and internationally. His awards include several honorary degrees and many citations and honors from organizations devoted to science, the humanities, and teaching.

A recent book, One Legacy of Paul F. Brandwein: Creating Scientists (Fort, 2010), begins to trace his influence on teaching and doing science.