CONCERNING THE FUTURE OF THE ONE-YEAR CHEMISTRY COURSE* 0. F. S T A ~ # O R D ,UNIVERSITY
O F OREGON,
EUGENE, OREGON
A writer in one of the early issues of THIS JOURNAL' makes the statement that about five hundred papers dealing, substantially, with the question of why we teach chemistry had been printed up to that date. It is safe to say that since then as many more have appeared. The present writer has not had the time to review this thousand or more contributions for their exact content, but from a fairly thorough familiarity with such articles feels that most of them are essentially a defense of the subject of chemistry as i t now exists in the school curriculnm. That such defensive measures should be taken is itself emphatic evidence that the courseisunder attack. This attack, when investigated, proves to be a great deal more than a mere repercussion of the fulminations directed against the study of science in the schools by the classicists of the last century as they resisted encroachments of science upon their curriculum. It carries, indeed, a much more serious implication which amounts to the accusation that the results obtained in the one-year chemistry course are quite incommensurate with the time, energy, and resources devoted to it. The attack has been met as well as may be in the aforesaid defensive articles, mainly by asserting, time and again, the benefits that ought to accrue from the course, these benefits being predicated almogt exclusively upon a theory of education known as the doctrine of formal' discipline. Now while the present writer does not prstend to be versed in the niceties of educational psychology, having merely struggled along for upward of a third of a century in the effort to get over to cis students, through main strength and awkwardness, such knowledge of chemistry as might be possible by such means, it nevertheless does seem that the doctrine of formal discipline is pretty thoroughly discredited. If this is true, tlien the scores and hundreds of adroitly worded objectives which have been set forth as reasons why every one should take a year course in chemistry must for the greater part be discarded as fantastic, aspirational, or even emotionally aspirational. Such a caustic pronouncement as this would not be justifiable, of course, were it based merely upon the collapse of a time-honored educational point of view. But when it is supported, as i t is, by a growing cdnviction among the friends of chemistry that all is not well with the one-year course, when searching analyses into the situation by these same friends of chemistry have disclosed things which are amazingly discoucerting, to say the least, it then becomes almost necessary to admit that the critics are measurably right. It is clearly to be understood here, of course, that the criticism is not applicable to chemistry courses which concern
* Presented before the Division of Chemical Education of the A. C. S, at Minneapolis, Minnesota, September 12, 1929. 1 Earl R. Glenn, 2, 670 (Aug., 1925). 565
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the making of the professional chemist or the training of one who for any reason seeks a command of chemistry as an avocation or as a working tool. Such persons, however, constitute a group which must follow the study of chemistry for a t least four years, and in numbers are only a per cent or two of all who now enter the one-year chemistry course. It was largely in response to the obvious necessity of bettering the situation that the Division of Chemical Education was instituted some years ago by the American Chemical Society. The growth of interest in the Division has in itself been striking proof that the issue is alive and important. Much has been accomplished as a result of this interest, and unstinted praise is due the men who are responsible. In attempting to locate and characterizetangible results, however, i t now appears that effort has been directed almost entirely to the matter of improving the one-year course as i t has existed from the beginning. In the opinion of the writer the highly important question of why i t is that the one-year course has not worked out in meeting the needs of the hundreds of thousands of students who take only that course has not been adequately discussed, although it certainly has been raised with overpowering emphasis by the few workers who have nndertaken to determine objectively what it is that students do get out of it. Would i t be sacrilege, then, to contend that what the course needs is not salvaging or renovating, but rather, in the light of our present knowledge, that it be ruthlessly scrapped? I t is not pleasant ever to play the r61e of devil's advocate, but in order to raise the above issue definitely it is the purpose of the present paper to advance certain considerations, briefly, &d therefore perhaps very inadequately, which may stand in support of the argument that the difficulties in the present one-year course in chemistry are due to faults which can be remedied only by wrecking away the present structure and putting something different into its place. The first of these considerations is certainly one which must be accepted as a statement of bald truth, namely, that the course in all essential respects is the same thing in both college and secondary school. Disregarding for the moment what the course is and how i t got that way, every one knows that secondary school teachers obtain their training in the college course and then proceed to pass it out to their students in the identical form in which they received it, aided and abetted by the fact that a college man wrote the secondary school textbook. I t is a fact, indeed, that the more ambitious high-school teacher, just to show that he is thoroughly competent, outdoes the college teacher in making the course highly technical. This tendency, incidentally, frequently has the unfortunate result that the college teacher, feeling the necessity of presenting something more advanced than his students got in high school, moves his snbject matter up a degree or two as to difficulty, the result eventually re-
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turning to the high school and thereby creating a vicious spiral. However all this may he, the fact indisputably remains that the one-year course is much the same thing wherever it may he found, and that its form and character are determined by the college course. This fact, then, leads immediately to a second consideration which is that the college course is and always has been nothing other than the introduction to a four-year program of chemistry study. As such it may he conceded that i t meets the needs of the student who may validate his efforts in the first year by necessary further study, hut it does not follow a t all that it yields adequate values to the student who does not carry through. The situation here, indeed, appears to be quite parallel to that of the student who goes through a single-year course of foreign language study: the effort so expended gives values, as every one knows, only if through years of subsequent study the ability to use the language is acquired. It is not necessary, however, to have recourse to parallelisms or analogies to substantiate the suspicion that values may fail to inhere without further study and lots of it, if any credence can be given whatsoever to the results which have been obtained in recent years from sincere and unbiased efforts to find out just what i t is that students do carry away from the one-year course. It certainly is a bitterly discouraging thing to the teacher that after the lapse of even a year the retention of subject matter as well as of other discernible values seems to be vanishingly small. Does not all of the evidence, then, lead inevitably to the conclusion that we are now attempting something impossible' F The subject matter of chemistty has to do, generally speaking, with certain selected phenomena in the environment as well as with their interpretation in terms of the members of a conceptual structure which we call theory. The phenomena in question are closely related to every aspect of existence, and no one questions the desirability of having every man possess such a familiarity of both the phenomena and their interrelationships that he could readily capitalize them in making his personal environmental adjustments. That this might eventually be the goal in scientific education was a hope, and perhaps even an expectation of the early fathers. As time has gone on, however, the complexity of phenomena has shown itself to he stupendously greater than the men of seventy or more years ago ever dreamed it could be. The hard, massy, atom of Newton, and likewise the atom of Dalton fuzzily enveloped in caloric, became, as Rowland in the eighties said, as complicated as a grand piano, and only yesterday as tenuous as the nature of thought itself. Theory has had to keep abreast of this almost incomprehensible opening out of the phenomenal world until today it is the task of a lifetime to obtain a sufficientcommand of some limited aspect of it to make it effective as a tool. It is a disappointment, certainly, that things have become less simple, less easy to grasp
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in a comprehensive way. The chemistry of everyday life instead of becoming understandable to every one, tends more and more to become the despair even of the specialist. Many things that to Mrs. Marcet were quite clear are all but unfathomable today. We are quite obviously in a situation where the more we know the less we know that we know. And yet, in the face of all of this, are we not guilty of adhering solemnly to a century-old ideal in educational practice which is as unfitted to conditions today as an ox-team upon Fifth Avenue, declaring that we teach the common man a smattering of chemical theory in the course of a few weeks so that it will be a matter of practical use to him? It may be argued a t this point, to be sure, that much more than mere theory is imparted to the student in the one-year course. Figures have been compiled showing the relative proportions of informational matter and of theory that are comprised in the conventional presentation of the course, and informational matter does seem to preponderate. I n spite of this statistical evidence, however, most teachers of chemistry probably admit that it is the attempt to teach and to apply a bit of theory that consumes the energy allotted to the course. Granting, however, that much information is involved, and there certainly is a lot of it, of what value is it to the man who is not going to be a chemist> The time was, not so long ago, when much was made of the old adage that knowledge is power. The more nearly a man might succeed in those days in making a walking encyclopedia of himself, the more effective he was supposed to be. The point of view has changed radisally, however, and is aptly characterized by A. N. Whitehead in his recently published book of essays2 when he asserts that the most useless bore upon God's earth is the merely well-informed man, that the acquisition of inert ideas is the most serious obstacle to be encountered in the educational process. Robinson, in his tract entitled "The Humanizing of Knowledge" likewise points out the absolute necessity of transmuting knowledge into wisdom if it is to be effective in rounded living. That there are occasional facts inside the covers of the general chemistry textbook that can be transmuted into wisdom by the student as he labors with them and that there are some ideas there which cannot be regarded as inert is not to be denied. But when one considers the simply enormous amount of time and energy devoted to learning the meanings of hundreds of technical terms such as deliquescence, dispersoid, dialysis, and the like: and of acquiring the ability to write equations for the reaction between sulfur and sodium hydroxide, the reaction for making chlorine, and so on with a thousand others, what boots it, anyway? Are not these ideas, both a t the time and ever afterward, completely in the class of inerts in so far as the layman is concerned? If Whitehead is a t all correct, are we not rendering such a student an egregious a
"The Aims of Education," A. N. Whitehead, Maemillan Co., New York, 1929.
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disservice in insisting that he learn these things? Have not Slosson, Gregory, Howe, the editors of the popular magazines, and for that matter the editors of the more serious magazines, too, all learned the better way of imparting the informational matter that the layman should know and apply in so far as application is possible? Is it not true that the news story writer, with his extraordinarily developed sense of what will make an appeal is far ahead of the textbook writer in his selections and presentations of informational matter? Do not the news-reel editor and the radio station manager likewise far out-distance the textbook authors in these respects? There remains for final arraignment in this discussion certain claims, often made, that the experiences encountered in the one-year course are particularly potent in the development of desirable character traits, in the gaining of appreciations, and the like. I t is unfortunate for those who argue either for or against the validity of these claims that their cases cannot he proved satisfactorily for the obvious reason that the qualities in question are not of a kind that can be subjected to quantitative measurement. To be consistent in his present r61e of devil's advocate the writer is compelled to take the point of view that there is very little in the course that does contribute either to the development of character or to the gaining of appreciations. To enumerate all of the reasons would take vastly more time than is here available. Some of the supporting evidence would he a reiteration of things that have been adduced in preceding paragraphs. But can you distinguish a student who has had the one-year course from i one who has not had it by any conceivable test mvolving personal qualities, altruistic tendencies, breadth of view, or what else you will? Granting that the opportunity is offered in laboratory work and elsewhere of facing the stern and unyielding rnles of the great game which Nature plays, is it not true that more men are broken under crucial tests involving character than survive the tests? In cases, for instance, where an apparent conflict exists between what Nature seems "to say" in the lahoratory and what the instructor is supposed "to want," how often does it happen that the student reports the saying instead of the wanting? The answer to this question, however i t may be given, will depend not upon any ennobling or rectifying influence exerted by the subject matter, but almost wholly upon the teacher and his relationship to the student. In spite of claims to the contrary the practice of ascribing miracle-working powers t o short-time exposures to curricular subject matter, whatever it is, is a fatuity in a class with pinning prayers to a prayer wheel. The faults and futilities that attach to the one-year course in chemistry, it is only fair to say, can with equal force be urged against the other one-year science courses and in addition against certain mathematics courses. As to what the solution shall be the writer can in the time that is avail-
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able do little more than point out possibilities. These are neither new nor original, since they are in the air, so to speak, where they are slowly but surely taking form. In the first place full recognition must be given to the fact that highly technical aspects of theory in science are sharp tools, requiring years to fashion, necessary for the specialist and useless to the non-specialist. For the ordinary mortal they are like the express train chased by a dog. Express trains are exceedingly useful things when in their proper place, but it would be an extraordinary dog kennel that would house one, and of what use would i t be there? To attempt to give a workable knowledge of theory in a year is an impossibility and experience shows that the few things which are imparted to the student belong thereafter to the category of inert ideas. One-year courses attempting to impart the ultimates of theory are the withered outcomes of well-intentioned hopes held by the educators of seventy years ago. There is apparently but one thing to do with them and that is to abrogate them, except in the colleges where thev should be made to petform more rigorously than ever their present function of starting the student upon a program of study to be continued for years or a lifetime. In setting up something to take the place of one-year science courses it is to be remembered first and always that Nature is one big thing and that i t is both desirable and possible for every educated man to understand its larger aspects even though its ultimate aspects have become incomprehensibly complex and impossibly multitudinous. It was this knowledge of proximate Nature that the early fathers really aspired to, and those aspirations are as valid today as they ever were. That we should forsake the pnrsuit of ultimates in general education and get back to the proximates is an obvious duty. The need for doing this has been sensed for a long time and found expression more than a decade ago in the general science movement. This movement has not been as respectable as it should be for various reasons that cannot be cited here. At the present moment, however, there is an insistent demand in the colleges for what are called survey or orientation courses in science. This demand is based openly upon the felt need of proximate understandings of Nature as a whole. In the opinion of the writer these courses are doomed to failure for the simple reason that in them also altogether too much is attempted for the time that is available. To obtain the values aspired to is the task of four years or six years rather than of one. It is a task that should be commenced in the grades and should continue through all of the secondary school years as a unified, coherent, progressive program. This is the thing that should be substituted for all of the present one-year courses. You say that we cannot accomplish the impossible; but all history is the impossible, the unforeseen, forged into reality by the hrain and the muscles of ~ ~ ~ . - M U S S O L I N I
