JESSE B. DAY Ohio University, Athens, Ohio
THE students enrolled for a course in general chemis-
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try can and do ask themselves the question: "What real use is this course to me?" The answer for the student who intends to major in a science is obvious. His hope is to derive information to use as a tool in making a living. But there must be some justification for the presence in the course of the girls who major in home economics and the boys who major in english or commerce. There is an answer, beyond the fact that the course may be required, or will provide the student with a certain numher of hours toward graduation. It has been my custom to provide some part of this answer in a lecture sometime during the first semester. Experience has shown that the students are most interested in the discussion after about six or eight weeks of the course have passed. The period of the teens and early twenties is a crucial one in life. It is during this time that the student is approaching intellectual and emotional maturity and is physically in his prime. It is also a t this time that he is striving to discover what meaning and purpose there may be in life; he is about to come to the conclusion that other people actually exist as important entities rather than adjuncts to his personal welfare; and it is now that with freshly opening eyes he seeks to put the world into an understandable perspective. At no other time than this is the mind so supple and so capable of amendment. If there is any real lack peculiar to the age it is the lack of all kinds of experience. Four years a t college should provide the social and personal experiences to fill this gap. The first year a t college may also be one of keen disillusionment, as the student discovers that the professors are not the gods who hold the final answers to all being and meaning in their august persons. The particular and important service that the chemistry teacher can make is the contribution of facts to the building materials of personal philosophy. Certainly the best and finest house requires the most materials for its constmcticn, and the most complete and satisfactory of personal philosophies must be housed in a framework of fact, however gaudily it may later be decorated with the furniture of speculation. This we can do: provide the student with some ideas concerning the structure of matter, the finiteness of the kmds of matter, and the changes matter can undergo. To this, it is hoped, may be added an appreciation for the orderliness of nature and the simple laws which govern the infinite proliferation of her works. One should be careful to present known fmts as the facts of
experience and experiment, and stress the idea that the guiding light of theory must be confirmed by the bench of physical manipulation. Certainly the student who has had one year of chemistry remembers virtually no detail after a few months. The things that stick will generally include some notion of atomic structure, and this informatiou will be of some help to the individual in forming a rational philosophy and in understandinp the very urgent implications of atomic power sources. But if this is to be all the student gains we may well be troubled. A good onesemester course in the nature of matter might be more to the point than a, year of chemistry. It is easy to attack any specific course as contributing little or nothmg that the student will use after graduation. However, the huge reality and meaning of education lie precisely in that web of concepts and attitudes which have no meaning without factual detail. It is of no importance that the scaffolding of empirical fact disappear after the edifice we call education has beeu erected. It is not wise to press the analogy too far. Beside this complex of attitudes and ideas we have called philosophy, or education, there is necessarily gained by the student a good deal of knowledge which might be characterized as off-hand knowledge in the sense that it is immediately present and usable whenever called up. Such is the knowledge the engineer uses in the practice of engineering and his information in the arts and literature which he may use in ordinary conversation. This immediately available information is tool and culture material and its acquisition is defensible. But what of that information which has been lost, unused as other than scaffolding? The answer is that it has not beeu lost. Material which has sunk below the level of recall may be much more easily relearned and understood than brand-new material. The foundations have been built and lie in readiness for the possible time when a particular skill is to be developed. This non-recall informatiou is thus not useless, even though a great part of it be unused. I t might be pointed out that even tool information is largely sunk below the level of recall. Especially in chemistry, though a man have a million facts in his head, he still needs the reference literature. The unique value of a course in chemistry is that it is the only course taken by the great majority of students in which they learn the structure and behavior of the matter of which their environment is composed. Such knowledge is of primary importance in the development of any realistic philosophy or the understanding of nature.
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