LETTERS To the Editor: It was with great interest that I read the "Editor's Outlook" in your October issue, and I sincerely appreciate the sympathy and understanding with my point of view on high-school chemistry which you expressed therein. The main purpose of my address a t Andover was none other than to get the ball rolling, and the interest you have taken in my viewpoint should certainly help to keep the issue alive until a satisfactory solution has been found. However, you have challenged some of my implications, and in the interest of the issue I feel compelled to reply to some of your statements. For anyone who was present when the address was made, even for those who read its printed condensation in your JOURNAL, it must be evident that all my remarks referred only to the teaching of chemistry in high schools. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the teaching of chemistry in college courses. It therefore seems to me that you must have misunderstood the sole purpose of my speech, with the result that most of your critiasm is beside the point. It is my contention that the teaching of chemistry in high schools should be limited to the fundamentals of chemical reactions in as illustrative and simple a way as possible. It first of all should create interest in the subject and permit the student to acquire a general rather than a detailed knowledge of what chemistry stands for. A boy or girl who h a s t o quote the editor-"not the mental capacity, the intellectual urge, or the economic means to go on to college," will get more of his one year of high-school chemistry for the rest of his life if he learns more of the how's than the why's, than he would being fed the latest theoretical developments of the electron theory, and the like. The teaching of these should be left to the college curriculum and in particular for those who have decided to make chemistry their profession. I believe this statement will help clarify the seeming difference in your opinion and the one I expressed, and I therefore consider i t unnecessary to discuss some of the other points raised in the editorial, a t least a t the mo, ment. I could not have asked for a better example to prove my point of view than your statement that most elementary students can explain the operation of the mass spectrograph and the electron theory better than methods of atomic weight determination or the law of multiple proportions. I do, however, want to add that I fully agree with you that we should not concentrate on the how to the exclusion of the why, a statement which, by the way, is not to be found in my address. All I said was that too much time is spent on the why of chemical reactions and too little on the how. Finally, you are astonished that I, an exponent of colloid chemistry, and one who in your opinion can do a pretty good job of interpreting it, am not in favor of
teaching colloid chemistry in high school. The reason I am against it is that a real understanding of colloidal phenomena calls for advanced knowledge of the fundamentals of general chemistry. I have no objections to refemng to colloids, and even offering a few simple demonstrations, but I emphatically disagree to injecting into the high-school student an entirely wrong idea of what colloids are. In my address I offered several examples that it is this which is now being done. ERNSTA. HAUSER
To the Editor: I enjoyed the October number of the JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION very much. . . The paper by Sisler and VanderWerf was very interesting. I notice that it is on "elementary college chemistry," but so far as my knowledge goes there are very few colleges in the world that apply much of the electronic theory to organic chemistry. . . . When I was young, the project of making trees to illustrate the relationships ofi numerous organic compounds was quite the proper thing to do, and some of my friends have been greatly interested in such projects. I was greatly amused with the pictorial display by Dobbins and Ljung. Such charts are exceedingly valuable to the person who makes them, and I have always diiered with my friend Simpson concerning their value to persons who do not make them. Simpson has made up charts to cover all the reactions used by A. A. Noyes in his large work on the qualitative analysis of nearly all elements and reports that students tell him they are wonderful helps, but I claim that students waste a lot of time trying to use them. I imagine that many of your readers will wax enthusiastic concerning this graphic representation of simplified qualitative analysis which seems to me much of the nature of a cartoon. . . . At Thayer last year I tried to get the class interested in the history of chemistry, and a t the end of the year I gave two copies of Moore's "History of Chemistry" as prizes. I was absolutely astounded to find an almost complete lack of interest in the historical side. I told the class about the bookcalled "Crucibles" (withits false historical data), and one member of the class tried to read it and gave i t up in disgust. It was the same in physics. When I told the class about the history of physics they went to sleep. I have been a t some loss to determine why most high-school pupils hate history. I am not sure that I know the answer. But it is a fact. Part of the trouble is that a person must have a pretty good foundation in order to appreciate the facts of history. To me it is remarkable that Bergman could make accurate chemical analyses, that Berzelius had so much chemical knowledge, and that J. L. Smith had a portable kit with which he could analyze minerals
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