I avoided biology in high school. Not intentionally, but partly due to scheduling conflicts, my college prep plan was oriented more towards math, chemistry and physics, and I never experienced biology in high school or college and my BA was in liberal arts years later.
I am curious as to what the differences are between 1959 high school/college biology and 2019 classes. What was taught then that is contradicted, modified and/or discarded now? What are the major changes in emphasis?
The only thing I’m aware of is using blood in the lab. We pricked our fingers for slides under the microscope.
These days blood would be a biohazard. AIDS
Otherwise the basic science hasn’t changed.
Crick and Watson only discovered the basic structure of DNA in the 1950s. Would that have made it into biology classes by 1959?
I wasn’t in science classes in 1959 or in 2019, but it would be likely much easier to list the things that haven’t changed massively. Likely the biggest change, though, is the understanding of genetics. In 1959, we still knew barely even the broadest details of how DNA/RNA and protein synthesis worked. This wasn’t stated until 1957, and this wasn’t discovered until 1958 and codons hadn’t been fully decoded until the late 1960s. Even from the time I was in high school and college in the late 80s/early 90s the knowledge of genetics (particularly in the discovery of new sub-types of RNA) is at least as big as going from the Bohr model of the atom to quantum mechanics.
Here’s a high school biology syllabus.
There’s a unit on Genetics and Ecology??? That’s unexpected and new.
The cells unit looks familiar. I don’t see any dissections. We did frogs and mice in my class.
PDF
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://1.cdn.edl.io/1UaAi8qXb44SGZK5QnM1oOZKHPd7cZIOSt1YyilN4GlZLkBO.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj9pt7Hwv3gAhVO2qwKHYxhAYcQFjAAegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw3n28pR_6Wq5E2ryMRV0pjG
Do kids in high school still disect frogs?
You don’t have to dissect, if a parent writes a note. I wrote that note for 2 of my kids. Y school MV. If I’m remembering right, one of my sibs dissected a fetal piglet. Ewww.
No. I might have heard of DNA by high school in the mid-1960s.
As Darren Garrison says, our understanding of genetics has increased exponentially. In 1959 not much beyond Mendelian genetics would have been taught.
At that time, students would still have been mostly taught the Two-Kingdom system of Plants and Animals. It wasn’t until 1969 that Whitaker proposed the Five-Kingdom system, adding Monera, Protista, and Fungi. I don’t know if that is still taught, or whether some other system has replaced it.
I can hardly imagine a wronger statement about any major scientific field.
According to my father, his high school biology textbooks (c. 1965) had diagrams of a cell featuring the nucleus, membrane, and some dots labeled “function unknown”. Mine (c.1998) had mitochondria, ribosomes, and so forth.
According to some googling it appears that the five kingdom system is still being taught, but I’d like to think that at least colleges would teach the three domain system.
I said basic science. Plant cells, photosynthesis, the modern classifications, species,genus,family,order, class, phylum,kingdom. The basics hasn’t changed.
Genetics is an entirely new field. I can’t recall how much we studied it in the late 70’s. My teacher was more focused on plants and animals.
I do remember studying plant hybrids.
Nowadays, fetal pigs seem to be the standard mammal dissection. I’ve heard, though, that it used to be stray cats. And dissection in general nowadays is on preserved specimens, not fresh-killed or live-but-pithed ones.
Fetal pigs have all the same basic anatomy, but I’m sure they’re less traumatic for the students. Probably easier to obtain, too.
EDIT: aceplace57, genetics is the basic science of biology. What’s the same is mostly just stamp collecting (and even a fair bit of that has changed).
In my college Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy class we dissected cats. Ones that had been put to sleep by shelters anyway, not specifically raised for the purpose.)
When I was in school (early 60s), the smart kids took physics and/or chemistry (I took both). The not-so-smart kids took biology, since it didn’t involve so much math. I think today’s biology classes would involve lots of math. No refuge for the dumb.
Biology was my easiest science course. It mostly involved memorizing definitions and spellings of new words. Then connect the dots and understand how they fit together. I only had high school biology and one required semester in college.
I still remember the bones in the human body and features of the brain, right & left hemispheres and four lobes of the cerebral cortex, (frontal, occipital, temporal, occipital). I’ve forgotten a lot that we crammed before the test.
Chemistry and Physics were much harder. I had to bust my butt studying my required Physics courses. I still feel that I just barely scratched the surface of that complicated field.
Sorry to disappoint you, but blood typing with real blood is still done in many classes - the trick is that if students only handle their own blood, then they can’t infect other students. Waste from this lab does have to be disposed of as a biohazard, but that’s not some impossible burden.
The university I work at probably has about 90-150 students do this every quarter, some high schools do it too, others use the synthetic blood, which has been commercially available since at least the 1990s, maybe earlier.
Cite? That sounds like another “You could never do THAT these days!” strawman.
Genetics has been around since the late 1800s, and chromosomes and eye-color mutations were studied in the nineteen-teens. We studied genetics in the mid-60s.
As a side note, we had to learn the metric system in Bio class, because America was switching over “any day now” (in 1967)… to this day, I can estimate cc and grams (without dealing drugs!).
ETA: Ninja’d on that blood thang…
I was offering speculation on blood testing in the student lab. It’s been almost 40 years ago since college.
I know basketball and other sports has a blood rule.
I’m surprised high school student labs still feature diy blood slides.
I’m glad at least one part of my school memories lives on. 
You only think that because you don’t know modern biology. We know far more about cell biology than we did in 1969. We now know that photosynthesis in green plants takes place in plastids that probably represent endosymbiotic cyanobacteria. New photosynthetic pathways have been identified, such as C4 and CAM.
Linnaean classification is still used for pigeonholing organisms, but the prevailing system of classification now is based on cladistics, which was developed in the 1960s. Even in the Linnaean system, the “Domain” level has been added above Kingdom, there are now at least five and maybe as many as eight Kingdoms instead of two (if Kingdoms can be recognized at all), and the understanding of other categories has been changed greatly. For example, under cladistics birds are now included in the Reptilia.