provocative opinion -
The Blackhole in Chemical Education Aad Zuur and J a c q u e s van Santen Postbus 2061, 7500 CB Enschede, The Netherlands Recently in the Netherlands and other industrialized nations, chemistry has not been particularly popular with widely divergent groups of people. Undoubtedly, real or perceived environmental calamities play an important role in people's perceptions of chemistry.- he educitional systemhasunfortunately contributed little insight into solving such perceptual problems. Since the early seventies therehas heen a sharp decline in the number of students enrolling in chemistry courses at the nniversitv level in the Netherlands as well as in other industrialized Eountries such as the U.S.A.,l Great Britaia2 and West Germanv.3 Althooch the exact reasons are very difficult to determine;it seems that the public image of chemistry has somehow invaded our classrooms. As chemical educators, we need not only to he aware of this invasion but also to begin to do somethina about it. In the last thirty years con&derahle changes have occurred in the ways chemistry has been taught. In the fifties and sixties, largely due t o t h e "Sputnik shock," the teaching of chemistry was increasingly determined by a scientific approach which focused on physical and chemical theories. he emphasis shifted from descriptive to theoretical chemistw, and unfortunately the how's and why's were never mentioned. The link between experimental data and observations was not made, and students came to regard these as facts. For example, sodium ions have the charge I+ because sodium atoms have one electron in the outer core! An,,thrr si:n ,,t'
