Do You Realize That in the Year 2000

Chemical Education Today

JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 76 No. 12 December 1999 • Journal of Chemical Education 1605

Editorial

Do You Realize That in the Year 2000…

This issue’s many articles on environmental chemistryreminded me that during the decade following 1965, the yearwhen I began teaching, it was popular to extrapolate variousgrowth curves to the year 2000. Often the results were star-tling. Projections that world population would double by theend of the century led ecologists to talk of a “populationbomb”. Problems were anticipated as a result of consump-tion of limited resources, pollution of air, water, and land,destruction of ecosystems and habitat, increasing poverty andfamine, and other environmental or social issues. Argumentsfor action were often prefaced by “Do you realize that in theyear 2000…”.

In 1970 this was a striking way to point out that ratesof change were accelerating and that change is not necessar-ily beneficial. With the year 2000 on our doorstep, it is ap-propriate to revisit the 1960s and 1970s, looking for mile-stones that mark not only problems but also progress. A littlereflection reveals that chemistry has contributed to alleviat-ing many of the problems, and substantial progress has beenmade in chemistry and chemical education.

Instrumentation now plays a far more important role.When I was an undergraduate, my student colleagues and Icomplained that we were not permitted to use thedepartment’s brand new IR spectrophotometer to help solveour qual organic unknowns. When I was a graduate student,the department’s one NMR instrument was operated by afaculty member and reserved for research. In this issue thereis a paper about pervasive incorporation of NMR through-out an undergraduate curriculum. Other undergraduate col-leges have similar programs—even using NMR in coursesfor non-science majors. Many other instruments that wereto be found only in a few research labs in 1965 are now es-sential to the education of undergraduates.

There are now far more opportunities for face-to-faceinteractions with others who are interested in chemical edu-cation. The first Biennial Conference on Chemical Educa-tion took place in 1970 at Snowmass-at-Aspen, Colorado.The first CHEMED conference was in 1973 at the Univer-sity of Waterloo, Canada. These conferences have grownsteadily, attracting well over 1000 attendees in each of thepast few years. Instead of just lectures, there is now a broadrange of hands-on workshops, poster papers, and other in-novative means of communication. The chemical educationprograms at ACS national and regional meetings are muchlarger and better attended than they were at my first ACSmeeting. Many presentations report chemical education re-search findings that are valuable guides for helping my stu-dents learn. There are more companies exhibiting materialsthat I can use in my teaching, and cultural, age, and genderdiversity is greater. I rejoice in the much larger number ofstudents attending national meetings, and I am told that atsession breaks there now are lines in both rest rooms.

In the year 2000, two-year colleges will educate a muchlarger number of students and a greater fraction of all stu-dents than in 1960. Public community colleges did not exist

until 1901, so they area phenomenon of the20th century—a mostwelcome one, given themany students theyserve who otherwisemight not have an op-portunity to pursue ca-reers that requireknowledge of chemistry. Two-year college teachers now or-ganize programs for national meetings, serve as officers ofthe ACS Division of Chemical Education, and are a muchstronger influence on chemical education—real progress.

There are more and better interactions among highschool and college teachers of chemistry. In 1970 both thisJournal and the Division of Chemical Education were almostentirely dedicated to college-level teachers. In the late 1970sand early 1980s both the Division and the Journal began toencourage much broader representation. This has beenextremely productive, as attested by high school days at ACSnational meetings and the many articles in each issue of thisJournal that are pointed out in the “Especially for High SchoolTeachers” column written by the Secondary School Chemistryeditor.

New developments in technology have affected bothteaching and research. The first demonstration of a workinglaser was in 1960, and at about the same time the transistor,invented in 1947, was beginning to supplant the vacuum tubein electronic circuits. This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistryis for the use of lasers to determine, on a femtosecond timescale, what happens as a chemical reaction takes place. OurMarch 1998 cover and Viewpoints article point out that moreelectronic components can now be put onto an 8-in. siliconwafer than the number of people on this planet, populationbomb or not. There is a lot more for students to learn, andcommunications technology affords us much wider scope forhow they learn it. Most computers in 1965 could commu-nicate only through decks of punched cards and printers thatwere ignorant of lower-case letters. We have progressedthrough time-shared mainframes, mini- and microcomput-ers, and networked desktop computers to the Internet. Jour-nal papers now report courses taken by students on differentcampuses who communicate via the Internet, and the Com-puter Committee of the Division of Chemical Educationholds several online conferences every year. The Journal, pluslots more, is now available via JCE Online to all subscribers,provided their computers have access to the Web.

As 1999 comes to a close, the pace of change has accel-erated to frantic, but chemical education is successfully ridingthe crest of the wave of progress. Our success can be attrib-uted to hard work and dedication on the part of a vast num-ber of people at all levels of the educational system. Let usresolve to continue that effort in support of even more andbetter change in the new millennium.

…chemical education is

successfully riding the

crest of the wave of

progress.