I The Horns of a Dilemma
I
provocative -
The Sputnik Age has come and gone, heing followed most recently by the Moon Age, the Age of Colored Television, the X-Rated Age, and the Age of Leisure. There seems to he some indication that the Age of Modern Civilization is rapidly drawing to a close. All one has to do is consider the riots and the murder reports in newspapers and the action pictures shown on television. Based on happenings around us, one might want to call this the Age of Fear, the Age of Anarchy, the Age of Streaking, the Age of Technology, or, for the real pessimist, the Last Age. In the realm of science teaching. we seem to he entering a new age, that of hutton-Pushing and chart-reading. It the time to fill the laboratories with instruments. It is the time to teach our students to push the buttons and to read the graphs relating to the number of huttons on the instrument. One wonders if this Age of Instrumentation is going to he a sensible and a useful age or if we are leading our students down the primrose path with gadgetry? Lahoratory instruments lend a degree of automation to chemistry experiments and they are impressive showpieces, hut do they belong in the laboratory courses of twoyear colleges? Do push-button experiments do as much for the education of a two-year college student as they do for the vanity of the professor who just may want to show off for the visiting colleague? I am concerned about the student of today and his ahility to handle freshman chemistry courses which are serving a numher of areas. I am also concerned about the student who transfers from the two-year college and what, if any, built-in handicaps we will saddle him with by introducing or not introducing instruments too early in his chemistry program. And third, I wonder whether we are wasting precious funds on instrumentation and maintenance in view of today's economic crunch. We are teaching young people more language a t an earlier age, more mathematics in lower grades, and a breadth of science never before heard of in the elementary schools. By the time a student gets to high school, he is takkig calculus, studying far more chemistry theory and more physics than many college freshmen received ten years ago. Yet we also see the average IQ of college freshmen lower than i t was ten years ago; we have seen the average student's reading ability going down every year for the past few years, and we have seen the verbal and math SAT scores on the average dropping over the past ten years. When today's student, with the background just given, reaches college, we find too often that he is a poor reader, that he cannot write well, that he does not know enough algebra (even though he has had calculus in high school), that he cannot name chemical compounds and that he does not know hasic principles of rnofi
