A HIGH-SCHOOL COURSE in CHEMISTRY WHICH DOES NOT LEAD to REPETITION in COLLEGE' P. M. GLASOE St. O l d College, Northfield, Minnesota
T
HE present high-school course in chemistry is open to the double indictment that It does not prepare for Or it is accepted as a credit for entrance, but students
with this credit are not admitted to advanced work in chemistry. -sented before the Division of Chemical Education at the ninety-iifthrneetingof the A. C. S.. Dallas. Texas, April 21,1938.
(2) It does not prepare for life. The high-school course in chemistry, 'today, is a paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, miniature, college firstyear course. It deals with a myriad of facts, threequarters of which are forgotten in a year following the It is far too technical and spends too much co~rse.~ time in memorizing the host of facts necessary for passing the examination, nSnally imposed by a higher examining authority than the high-school teacher. It leads to nothing else than a college first-year course which is a detailed repetition of the work done in high school. The latter degenerates into a process of cramming in an effort to fortify the pupils against the impending college entrance examination. Cramming mill+politely called "coaching schools"-are operated by experts who have developed a technic for memorizing the vast array of facts that will be required during the college entrance examinations. A study of the examination questionsJ given by the college entrance authorities reveals the fact that over ninety per cent. of them are memory questions, instead of involving thought and reasoning. No doubt every State Board of Education or other supervising authority bas had high ideals in view when they outlined the course of study for the students of chemistry in their states. Here are some of the guiding principles which the State Board of Minnesota had in mind when the course was outlined. (1) A thorough knowledge of elementary chemistry as such knowledge relates itself to good citizenship, social welfare, home and community life, commerce, the trades, and professions. (2) An understanding of the interrelation of all sciences, thus giving a broader appreciation and understanding of the world in which we live. (3) Training in scientific observation and thinking, leading to the ability to make impartial comparisons and careful generalizations upon a sound factual basis. (4) Vocational information which will assist a pupil to determine whether che'fnistry offers him a field for his lifework. (5) Chemical knowledge which will contribute to individual and community health. (6) Interests which may function in a more worthy use of leisure time. All of which is "a consummation devoutly to be wished." It is to be feared, however, that with eight hundred pages of text to be memorized in order to be ready to pass the threatening examination, the cultural, social, vocational, health, and other laudable implications, get slight attention. Much as we would l i e to have our bigh-school students emerge from their course thus equipped, we know that such ideals are impossible of attainment. No doubt they are justified under the plea that "not failure but low aim is crime." The fact of the matter is, high-school textbooks are cyclopedias of technical, chemical facts instead of being guides to a cultural understanding of what chemistry 2 POWERS, S. R., J. CHBM.EDUC.. 2,174 (1925). "RICH,
S. G., ibid., 2,142 (1925).
is and what it does. Boys and girls can get a much more sympathetic understanding of chemistry through knowledge of how it deals with their problems of hreathing, eating and digesting their food, the way their clothing and shelter are provided, and the way it contributes to health and happiness than through the learning, for temporary purposes, of a thousand more or less unrelated facts. Hunter4 claims that chemistry and physics have not held their own in the enrolment of high-school students. In thirty-eight years the percentage of chemistry students has been reduced from 9.62 to 7.31. In the face of the "very urgent boosting" of chemistry by the American Chemical Society and the interest aroused as a result of war propaganda, this is a disconcerting fact and one that must be explained from the inside. Hunter goes farther and shows that physics, in the same time, has dropped from an enrolment per cent. of 31.36 to 7.13; that the courses in physics and chemistry are rigidly static and have changed but little from the days of the Committee of Ten (1893); that these rigid courses consist of "the factual material and laws which college professors deem necessary as a basis for further achievement in college." (Let it be parenthetically remarked that after the high-school student has mastered this course, the college textbook and the college first-year course in physics blandly ignore the whole matter and proceed on the supposition that the freshman knows little or nothing about physics.) Faint criticisms have often enough been raised against the miniature college first-year course given in high schopl. There is .something radically wrong, a confession of impoverishment-when the college student shall be forced to retrace his high-school chemistry or physics course from A to 2, with only a few more trimmings added. The better the high-school beaching is, the more disastrous is the college procedure. ' A correspondent writes me, "I teach high-school chemistry; my college freshmen habitually return to tell me in great glee that they 'never had to crack a book' in freshman chemistry. They think i t a compliment to my teaching; I know i t to be merely a sad reflection on the way our colleges do things. What high-sch6ol teacher could not tell most of the colleges of the ruin they have caused in killing the interest of young embryo chemists who are alert, chemists 'on the mark, ready set,' and where the college should crack the gun of 'gov-they listen in vain without hearing so much as the click of the hammer." It is said that the Committee on Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society had "thirty thousand criticisms and suggestions from chemistry teachers, when the question of a Standard Minimum Course of High-School Chemistry" was being considered, and yet their proposed course deviates only very slightly, if a t all, from the eight-hundred . page . 'HUNTER.G. W., "Science teaching," American Book Co., New York City. 1934, p. 149.
texts now on the market. It is further proof of the hold which the "college entrance" idea has on both college and high-school teaching staffs. The question is not, shall high-school chemistry prepare for life, but shall it prepare for entering college? And that, in the face of the fact that colleges refuse to accept the highschool course as preparatory to advanced work, and the additional striking fact that only a very small per cent. of high-school students continue physics and chemistry for any purpose whatever in college. Now and then some individual teacher breaks through the age-old traditions and with a stroke of genius brings out an experiment in humanized science that sets communities agog; one that has for its objectives that of interesting and teaching live boys and girls the intensely practical physics and chemistry of living. Such a case is now developing in St. Cloud, Minnesota, under Mr. 0.A. Nelson. Since he introduced his glorifiedcourse in physics in 1936 the enrolment jumped from twenty-four to one hundred eighty-seven-an increase of seven hundred eighty per cent. A special physics course for girls is given, and here, too, registration rose from six to ninety-three in the same t i m e an increase of 1550 per cent. It is passing strange that i t should be so difficult to change the ideal from that of preparing for college, according to the set notions of almost fifty years ago, to that of teaching the physics and chemistry of living. We are prepared to meet, here, the age-old argument that to teach what chemistry is: what i t has done, is doing, and will do, you must have a thorough foundation in the elements of chemical knowledge, such as is supposed to be given in the eight hundred pages of our high-school texts of today. Biology has not set up such a rigid requirement for the pursuit of its course. The pupils study flowers, plants, animals, and man without stressing the "life principle" a t all; they deal with cells, cell growth, and multiqlication without the faintest idea that they are here concerned with the most complicated chemistry in existence, without even knowing what kind of molecules make up the cell or how they work. Progress has been made both in teaching and textbook writing in the field of biology. Physics and chemistry texts and teaching have been static. The stream of life is passing over and around them with the results as shown: physics has gone down from 31.36 to 7.13 per cent.; chemistry from 9.62 to 7.31 per cent. This is an educational democracy. High-school youth are declaring a protest against the too formal, too technical, and uninteresting courses in high-school physics and chemistry. They want to live by the way, and so they choose subjects that offer human interest as a part of their substance. In his highly entertaining and instructive "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son," the honored editor of the Saturday Evening Post, tells of a young man who was thick as thieves with all the Greek philosophers and could read the poets in the original, but when he got out of college he couldn't seU an insurance policy
nor could he "go on the road." He tried job after job and lost each in turn. Finally he got a position to teach Greek and Latin in a boys' school, but he forgot completely that he was teaching dead languages to live hoys and so he was out of a job again. A high-school course of today that has remained largely static since the "Committee of Ten" must come dangerously near the charge of trying to teach dead chemistry and physics to live hoys and g i r l s t h e reaction is they refwe to take it. We who have been in the business of teaching college chemistry since the days antedating the Committee of Ten have worked up a defence mechanism which sounds like this "I don't believe in a superficial course in chemistry that may so easily degenerate into a snap course about chemistry. I believe in teaching the fundamentals and teaching them thoroughly, so that the student shall have something to build on in after life." The trouble with that whole proposition is that while we teach those fundamentals, we load them down with so much scientific verbiage, so many principles and applications that the whole business becomes a memory rigmarole, most of which is unessential, impractical, and highly theoretical. We object to superficiality but we are very well satisfied to talk about the Avogadro number, about the Law of Mass Action and equilibrium, about the details of normal, molar, and standard solutions, about ionization and osmotic pressure, just as if the average high-school student's life depended on it. We deal with atoms and molecules, millions of millions .pf millions of them; we speak of the kinetic energy of molecules and of the way they collide, as if i t really meant something to u s as if we really understand what we are talking aboutwhich, of course, we don't. We teach about chemical affinity and chemical energy as if we knew all about them; just as physicists and astronomers play hide and seek with gravity and magnetism. I tell my students that sodium unites with chlorine because sodium is electrically plus and chlorine is electrically minus. But do they? Are they? And why? No, there is so much superficiality about our teaching of fundamentals that we may well shear away a lot more and probably leave the students with a few material concepts which they can take with them as illustrations of what chemistry is and equally as much what it is not. We teach economics without insisting on a thorough mastery of theoretical statistics and higher mathematics; it is possible to give a live course in sociology without knowing all about the secret sins of society, the complicated chemical cures for social diseases, or the intricate laws of eugenics; we study the German language without knowing how many other languages have words like uater and mutter and without knowing why die, der, and das have come to be used as they now are; we study arithmetic without knowing the algebraic reason underlying our rules for square and cube root. The same applies to chemistry. You don't have to
teach the solution of problems under Boyle's and Charles' laws in order to understand that when the air in the furnace is heated it rises, or that i t takes many strokes of a pump to inflate a tire. Every intelligent boy and girl of today knows that while the tire remains the same size the amount and pressure of air in it varies directly with the number of strokes of the pump; also that the volume of the air in the pump varies inversely with the pressure upon the piston. You don't have to teach how to balance oxidation reactions by the electronic method in order to understand that ammonia is formed in soil decomposition of organic matter and that oxidation plays an enormously important r61e in our bodies and in the manufacture of sulfuric and nitric acids, as well as in the reaction going on in the home furnace. The professional chemist should understand as much as possible about the nitration of cellulose, the manufacture of T.N.T. and the formula of a hundred dyes; the intelligent high-school boy can easily understand the formation of celluloid, bakelite, smokeless powder, and rayon-yes, he can go pretty nearly as far as the professional himself. We boast of the scientific method and aspire to give our students the scientific spirit; but what are we to conclude when we are confronted with the cold fact that ninety out of every hundred questions asked in college entrance examinations are memory questions instead of requiring thought and reasoning? We sing in an age-old hymn, " 'Tis all in vain that you profess the doctrines of the Church, unless you live according to your creed." That principle should apply in chemistry. If we believe in the scientific method and pretend to teach i t or according to it, why don't we give our students a chance to show, in how far they have profited by it, by giving them scientifically formed questions, involving thought and reason? But-I hear some one say-how are we going to spend one hundred eighty hpurs teaching high-school chemistry if we are not to be permitted to teach the atomic weights and atomic numberSof some twenty-five or thirty elements, their valences, and their myriad combinations? How about having to leave out atomic structure, equation writing, electron balancing, reactions for making sulfuric and nitric acids, phosphine, superphosphate, Haber's and Ostwald's ammonia processes; the full explanation of the Birkeland-Eyde, the LeBlanc and Solvay processes; the use of the cyclo~. tron, and so forth? It does like a revolution. to be sure. All the -~ - - look -~ subjects mentioned are essential for chemistry majors, for pre-medics, pre-engineers, and many other professions. But, remember, the great majority of your high-school students are not going to be chemists; they will not even go to college. Besides, your college first-year course will take care of that; i t repeats all the substance of the present high-school course anyway. The new procedure would ~ i v ethe high school an.excellent chance to teach its boys and girls a great deal of chemistry that will be of value to them throughout life. ~~~
A SUGGESTION POR THE NEW PROCEDURE
Suppose we begin by calling the students' attention to the fact that they know a good many chemical data already, that is, the souring of milk, the properties of vinegar, fruit juices, and so forth; the "sweetening" of sour milk with soda, the electrolyte of their car battery; the action of soap, the use of baking powder, baking soda, fermentation in home-made apple cider, root beer, and the like. They know the names of a dozen or more common metals and a number of alloy-you don't have to teach these to them; you need only remind them, and if you treat each of the facts mentioned above you have already made a good start in humanized chemistry. From here on you can build on their general science course, recalling, in review, every fact they once have learned. The atmosphere makes a good starting point. Burning, as an introduction to oxidation, brings up the formation of water. Then follow breathing and oxidation in the animal body; the formation of carbon dioxide; the exchange of this gas for oxygen in the lungs. As soon as you mention carbon dioxide it opens the whole field of coal, its formation, its uses, its products, its conservation, and waste. But you are far from having done with the atmosphere: the whole problem of ventilation, moisture content, physiological influence of carbon dioxide, resuscitation, pulmotors, oxygen administration in cases of lung disease; first aid for the drowning. A host of side lines of acute interest to daily living suggest themselves. Right a t this point the Weather Bureau may be studied. Here is an excellept place for the introduction of ap intensely practical use of the scientific method. What is the Weather Bureau? Where are its stations? Who are the observers? How does an observer spend his time? What are low pressure areas? High pressure areas? What are trade winds? What are tornadoes? What is a whirlwind? Will it interest boys and girls to know that the air resting on one acre of ground weighs 44,000 tons? They will cease wondering about the power of a tornado when they know that the air on one square foot weighs a ton and when you put this air into motion, forty, sixty, seventy-five miles per hour, you get a momentum of terrific destructive force. . All that has to do with the atmosphere, and we are by no means through. There is romance in the discovery of helium in the sun years before it was found on the earth; and in how helium helped to solve the problem of radium and of the triumph of filling a fleet of Hindenburgs of six million cubic feet capacity each with what was once, and still is, a rare gas constituent of the atmosphere. There is no damage done by calling attention to the romance of chemistry; there is lots of it. By a balanced welding of the romance with the pragmatism of chemistry you can make a subject that will keep boys and girls "on their toes" in pursuit of more and more knowledge " about what makes UD the life interests of intelligent human beings. An impractical and highly
theoretical treatment for high-school youth will lead to ennui and sophistication; the pragmatic-romantic treatment keeps active the natural buoyancy of child interest in life and its varied problems. The reason so many young people act as if they are bored with educa-
tion and which makes them seek their interests in extracurricular affairs is that their interest in chemistry, mathematics, and language haee been snu£fed out by poor teaching and uninteresting methods of presentation.
