CHEMISTRY in HIGHER EDUCATION' J. H. HILDEBRAND University of California, Berkeley, California
0
N SUCH an occasion as this I need not list the ordinary and rather familiar material contributions of chemistry. The press is doing far better now than formerly in publishing the results of scientific research. The scientist is now seldom pictured as a medieval alchemist surrounded by alembics, magic paraphernalia, and dried lizards. A new scientific discovery is described rather well; but while the public learns something of its value and significance, it learns little or nothing of the process of discovery. Nor do I need to expound the position of chemistry, along with mathematics and physics, as the foundation for other sciences and arts. The place of chemistry in many curricula bears adequate testimony to its fundamental position. This place, moreover, is not the result of educational theorizing, like much that has crept into higher school and college curricula, but comes from natural demands of the professions. I desire, rather, to develop a role of chemistry that is ditferent from the one just mentioned; and that I believe can hear more emphasis than i t usually receives; namely, its contribution to general education. A test for this contribution would be the value that remains for one who does not make direct occupational use of what he has studied. I may illustrate this distinction between general and vocational education by two rather extreme examples. Few students of Greek can hope to become professors of Greek; there are but few professorships, and there is no other vocational outlet. However, there is no educated person who will deny the value of studying the marvelous flowering of culture that took place in ancient Gree e nor is i t altogether impractical to do so. Even the k n e s s man might be better and wiser for a major in Greek in college. On the other hand, let us consider optometry, a most serviceable occupation, training for which is of value to future optometrists and their patients. Suppose, however, that the student does not eventually become an optometrist? What residuum of educational value will remain? Something of value, of course, but hardly much. Now my thesis is that the residuum may be enormous in the case of chemistry if properly taught, for chemistry is not merely a possible vocation but a science as well. One of the most obvious services of chemistry is to develop some understanding and appreciation of our environment. The universe is made of chemical elements. The effects of their properties are visible
'Address delivered at the dedication of the new Chemistry oregon,~~~~~b~~ Laboratory at Oregon State College, carvallis, 2, 1939.
on every hand. Even the characters of our friends are determined in part by their hormones. The great cultural periods-the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the results today of the isolation of the light metals-are the effects of the electrochemical series of elements. The migrations, wars, and trade arteries of history have been in part determined by the occurrence of the elements and compounds. The historian himself is not always equipped to see these things, but they are there and their appreciation contributes to education. Equally important, though less appreciated, is the tremendous impact of scientific thinking on human civilization. Some notion of this may be obtained by considering the essence of Greek tragedy, which is, perhaps, the noble but hopeless struggle of man against purely arbitrary divine enmity. Today we are still often defeated, but we believe that something could and should be done about our calamities. Lord Dunsany has vividly pictured this emancipation in one of his imaginative tales, "The Men of Yarnith." The inhabitants of this fabulous country were sorely stricken by drought and famine, but believing these calamities to be sent, or a t least permitted, by their god, Yarni Zai, they did little about thembut "pray to Yarni Zai as he sat far off beyond the valley, praying to him night and day to call his Famine hack, but the Famine sat and purred and slew all the cattle and dared a t last to take men for his food." But one bold man, Hothrun Dath, sought out the god in his remote mountain valley, to make a special plea. He found the great stone image with "the marks of instruments of carving about the figure's feet." Enlightened, he reported this to his fellows. "Then the men of Yarnith, when they knew that the Famine came not from the gods, arose and strove against him. They dug deep for wells, and slew goats for food highilp on Yarnith's Mountains and went afar and gathered blades of grass, where yet it grew, that their cattle might live. Thus they fought the Famine, for they said: 'If Yarni Zai he not a god, then is there nothing mightier in Yarnith than men, and who is the Famine that he should bare his teeth against the lords of Yarnith.'" The emergence of this same struggle of the scientific method and spirit against entrenched and arbitrary authority is likewise vividly portrayed by Merejkowsky in his "Romance of Leonardo da Vinci," a rare fusion of literary skill with appreciation of the essence of science. The contrast between the different approaches to problems may be illustrated from my own experience with the minds of freshmen. I shall not apologize :
414
for this little excursion into psychology, for the professional psychologists have largely abandoned the study of freshmen for that of rats. We cannot wait for them to fathom the minds of rats and then work up again-we may charitably assume that i t is up--to freshmen, for the freshmen are with us in the meantime and we have to do what we can for them. I tell them that I have observed four ways commonly used for solving problems, whether by freshmen or by others. The first may be called "the formula method." You get a formula from the book or from a teacher, write it on your cuff or commit i t to memory long enough to pass the examination, feed in the numbers like meat into a sausage machine, turn the crank, and get out the results. The operator may not understand the machine a t all; it was designed and constructed by others. This process plays a large role in education, even in courses in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, where it is essentially out of place. For ,example, the high-school student is taught that a formula can be derived from a percentage analysis by dividing percentages by atomic weights, and so forth. Why, he usually cannot explain. He even converts actual weights obtained'by analysis into percentages before proceeding, for that is what the formula seems to require. Another trouble with dependence on formulas is that we cannot equip the student with formulas foreven a fraction of the problems that life presents; and even if we could, he would not remember them all and many of them would be wrong. The final average is low for this method of meeting dificulties. Next comes the method that we may call "the flashof-inspiration method." You read over the examination questions and then cast your eyes upward and pray for light. The trouble with this is that few people can get inspiration when it is wanted, and some never get i t a t all. The returns by this method are still lower than by the previous one. ' Third comes what may be called $the dice-throwing method." You throw the numbers onto the paper, and if you have luck they arrange themselves so as to give the right answer. For example, youwrite A : B : : C : X or perhaps it is X: C. You then try to recall the rule about means and extremes. If you have good luck, X and Care arranged in the right order and, if you can remember the rule, you get the right answer. The trouble is here that there are so many wrong arrangements possible. You are in the position of the man who called up Information over the telephone and said, in a distressed tone of voice, "Please tell me what wrong number I must call in order to get Prospect 4321." The fourth method is the method of analysis. One takes stock of data given. One must first eliminate non-essentials. For example, if you want to know how much soda is necessary for Mrs. X to make some round buns on Sunday morning, December 3, a t 8:00 A.M., when the moon is in the last quarter and President Roosevelt is in the White House-whether in hislast quarter or not, we do not know-it is obvious to an in-
telligent person that most of these attendant circumstances are not pertinent to the essence of the problem. As soon as the problem is divested of all such adventitious information, a person with a reasonably welltrained mind looks a t the goal, just as a person endeavoring to get across the stream looks a t the opposite bank; if he cannot make it a t one jump, he then hunts for a series of stepping stones, each one of which he can make in a single step. In analytical thinking, a series of similar steps is discovered, so that a person may go from the data given to a desired conclusion in an orderly and logical way, without getting his intellectual feet wet. Finally, since errors may creep in, either into the premises or into the logic, the results may be tested where possible or necessary by experiment. Now chemistry lends itself excellently to this process. For example, while i t is possible in qualitative analysis merely to call for a recipe for treating an unknown (which represents the formula method), i t is possible to use the type of question which we have developed, in which we give a list of possible solid constituents of an unknown, followed by partial observations of its behavior. We ask the student then to draw conclusions concerning the presence or absence of each of these constituents. This involves not only knowing the reactions but being able to gage the effects of crossreferences, as in a game of chess. A correct answer is evidence not only of chemical analysis but of intellectual analysis. A most valuable feature of chemistry is its emphasis on the authority of experiment. The test tnbe, not the teacher or the book, is final. T-he most valuable educational experience I ever had was in high school. The teacher of chemistry was the principal, who had had one year of college chemistry. I had learned by myself more chemistry than he knew, and instead of imposing the authority of his position upon me, he gave me the key to the laboratory and turned me loose. There were plenty of real problems in my head. I had a book entitled "Chemical Philosophy," by a Harvard professor, in which the elements were rigidly divided into "artiads" and "perissads," those of odd and even valence. Now this rigid division worked well for most elements, but to make it apply universally, the professor liked to double up his formula by the aid of assumed extra bonds. Nitrogen in ammonia, nitrous oxide, the trioxide, tetroxide, and pentoxide could be assigned odd valences in each case. The chief flaw in the system was furnished by nitric oxide, NO. The professor claimed that two molecules of this substance are hitched together by a third bond. I therefore undertook to find out by the aid of high-school facilities whether it really was Nz02or just simple NO. I collected this gas over water in a eudiometer tnbe and oxygen in another tube. I poured the nitric oxide into the oxygen, so that the latter would be in excess and there would be no possibility of forming the trioxide. The tetroxide formed dissolved in the water, and the volume relations in the chemical reaction which took place enabled
me to show by the aid of Avogadro's Rule that the formula was NO. Now, I'm sure that for this high-school student i t did a great deal of good to find out conclusively that a Harvard professor could he wrong. It was probably the most important single research he has ever done. I insist that it is a fine thing for a studeut to have the privilege of proving the book or the teacher to he wrong. The courses in so-called "social science" overwhelming many high schools today do not permit this so clearly. The practice of scientific method in chemistry provides a wholesome antidote to shoddy thinking in the social sciences. Another advantage of chemistry is that it is hard. It does not lend itself a t all well to over simplification. We are continually beset in this world by patentmedicine vendors, who offer simple panaceas for complex social ills. The platforms of political parties abound in them. We are told, for example, that prosperity would result if government would only leave business alone. That sounds delightfully simple, but people who fall for i t overlook the fact that a depression developed when business was being pretty much let alone, and big business itself immediately began calling for help. Of course i t does not follow that present government policies are wise. In California, we are very active in brewing such remedies, and the more extravagant the claims, the more appeal they sePm to have. If a medicine is advertised to cure everything from dandruff to corns, by golly, i t must be pretty good. The economics of Ham and Eggs is most appealing, for it offers to get prosperity out of a hat. It is in chemistry that we learn most forcibly that equations must balance. It is important to recognize what cannot be done or known. I was lecturing one day on the arrangement of observations on chemical reactions, so as to draw couclusions regarding others. After a rather complicated series of comparisons, I came to the conclusiou that a certain reaction could not be predicteGat all. A certain studeut emitted a noise which indicated that he thought we had been wasting our time. This gave me an opportunity to point out how important it is to know sometimes that certain statements such as people make cannot he based on any sort of real knowledge. It would he very fine, of course, to be able lo predict the stock market; but that is not an argument in favor of giving courses in predicting the stock market. Indeed, i t may save one a great deal of expense if he can recognize the fact that solicitors for contributions and investments usually cannot possibly know the things that they allege. Chemistry is a real discipline. Chemistry cannot be handled by mere memory; it has to be understood. It cannot run wild among a forest of verbiage; it is checked by a stern nature herself. Chemistry shares both the more deductive, rigid approach characteristic of physics with the more inductive approach characteristic of biology. We can be rigid and quantitative in part, hut we also possess a
vast array of material not yet subject to rigid treatment, concerning which we have to be content with predicting correctly, say, four times out of five. The subject is therefore capable of exemplifying various aspects of the scientific method. Chemistry has the advantage of offering the student, almost from the start, the opportunity to practice scientific methods. An "unknown" in qualitative analysis is a little research. It has all the appeal of cross-word puzzles or games of skill. The overemphasis on so-called student "activities" in our institutions is evidence that we leave too little scope for initiative in their academic work, which, I suppose, should be called "student inactivities." I find that the students of chemistry in my own institution are excited about i t to a degree seldom found in other groups. They argue with each other, they pump me for information about the whole universe, even in my freshman quiz sections. Let us keep this up; other academic work needs this atmosphere. Indeed, society needs the corrective service of science. Nature equips us, for both enjoyment and protection, with emotions as well as intellect, but these are too rarely harnessed together. Even in this age of science, few important questions are determined by scientific methods, even where i t offers the only hope. The temble inhumanity rife in Europe and Asia today is not the product of science, but of mass paranoia, which has prostituted some of the results of science to its own fevered dreams. The violent tirades of persons in this country possessed of Messianic complexes offer mirages only; they do not guide along the slower, more painful paths of true progress afid happiness. What hope do we hate, except that men may be taught, patiently and slowly, to distrust violent methods, and to discipline themselves to honest thinking, with emotion motivating but not dominating reason? Emotions are fine for binding together family and friends, for enjoying art and nature, for giving courage and loyalty, but even in these realms, emotions cannot run amuck without danger, and in the complex problems involved in the relations between masses of men, we must be intelligent if we possibly can. Humanity spends so much time recovering from quick remedies, that it would be better to cease taking these, even though no specific can be offered in their places. In'order to make our chemistry serve the ends of liberal, as well as vocational and professional education, we must endeavor to teach it as science, not as dogma. We must he critical of time-worn explanations, venerable from repetition, unsupported by either logic or evidence, such as the statement that in the electrolysis of a sodium sulfate solution the sodium first deposits, then reacts with water. If the electrons finally get to the hydrogen ions of water, why cannot they go there in the first place? No one says that in an electrolysis of a solution containing copper ions and zinc ions, the zinc 6 r s t deposits and then replaces the copper. Why should one offer a corresponding explanation in the other case?
I knew a professor who defined chemistry as "the science dealing with the deep-seated permanent changes in matter." The definition was illustrated by picking up a piece of iron with an electromagnet and then turning off the current so that the iron was dropped. This was a temporary change, and therefore "physics, not chemistry.'' I used to want to ask what would be the result if the core of the magnet had been steel instead of iron, when the magnetism would have been permanent. Would that make it cbemistxy? But such questions were not in order.
Good teaching must, it seems to me, be vitalized by research. A good research man is not necessarily a stimulating teacher, but can a teacher, even though entertaining, be truly great if he has not enough curiosity about his subject t o ask a few hitherto unanswered questions? Science is t o be found in books, yes, in part, but it is not a stagnant pool from which men dip medicinal draughts; i t is a living stream, with sources high among the snows, unattainable by the many, but a stream that nevertheless flows down among the habitations of men and waters their homes and fields.
