Editor's Page

Some thoughts on chemical education William Thomas Lippincott is professor of chemistry at the University of Arizona. He has been described accurately as "one of the foremost chemical educators in the world." From 1967 to 1979 he was editor of Journal of Chemical Education. Last week at Wellesley College his massive and highly innovative contributions (begun in 1948) to the teaching of chemistry were further recognized when he re­ceived the James Flack Norris A ward of the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society. The prepared text of his award address expresses his extreme pride in the accomplishments of both chemists and chemistry over the past 50 years and in the recent progress of chemical education toward becoming a subdis­cipline of the science. However, he also expresses some concern over the chemi­cal profession's handling of its responsibility to chemistry-related societal prob­lems. To wit:

One issue that will arise in attempting to prepare students to deal responsibly with chemis­try-related societal problems is that of helping science professionals become more sensitive to the societal implications of their work. To confront this issue is to re-examine some basic values, ethics, and priorities that have been part of our way of doing things for a very long time. For example, some of the insensitivity to public health and safety that we perceive in certain industries, inventors, scientists, engineers, and others undoubtedly is related to how science and much technology is created.

The working conditions for the creators are both more isolated and more free than are those of most of the rest of society. This allows the workers to devote all their energies to solving problems without being concerned about the impact of the solutions elsewhere. Added to this and deeply ingrained in all who pursue science is the methodological ethic. This not only demands scrupulous objectivity in investigating and reporting—elements that are ab­solutely essential in science, as we all know—but for a great many scientists and those who work with them it also has become an article of faith. In essence, they adhere to the idea that the scientists's ultimate allegiance is to the methodological ethic alone—that there is something immutable or "God-given" in the scientist's detached search for truth.

If we are to prepare our students to be both good scientists and responsible citizens, we must make it clear to them that it is an error to believe that values and ethical priorities ap­propriate in isolated scientific activity and in scientific modes of thought are equally appropriate in real world humanistic activity and in humanistic modes of thought. Science is great at dealing with things, but people cannot be treated as things.

A question that should be discussed openly in classrooms of students who have elected science as a career is: When the demands of scientific objectivity clash with the obligation to pursue social good, how do we resolve the conflict? It is to the credit of nearly every sci­entific discipline that acceptable answers to this question have been developed in certain specific instances.

As a society, we must develop throughout the entire scientific community the kind of sensitivity to safeguarding the public from potential science-based hazards that will assure enough early warning to avoid serious consequences. As chemistry teachers our part in this is to begin in earnest the sensitization process with our students. Among other things, we must work to instill in them the obligation to protect the public from known dangers, and to inform it on matters of controversy so that the people can have some say in how these matters are resolved.

Another way to look at or to approach the deeper problem we have been discussing is to begin with questions such as: • Should we continue to teach chemistry as if it existed in a social and cultural vacuum? • What priority should we give to the duty of preparing our students to répond with intelligence and insight to the major science-related issues they are likely to encounter? D

Views expressed on this page are those of the author only and not necessarily those of ACS

Nov. 15, 1982C&EN 5