Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Chemistry – Study and teaching (Secondary) – United States »

Even though there have already been many studies of the reception of scientific discoveries and theories, only a few discoveries have been systematically examined from a comparative perspective, in particular Darwin’s theory of evolution in biology and Einstein’s relativity theory in physics. In the field of chemistry, the periodic system of the elements is a good candidate for such comparative reception studies. Although the discovery of the periodic system and its later history have generated numerous inquiries, its reception has received only partial or scanty attention. In his noted paper published in 1996, the American historian of science Stephen G. Brush explored the role that successful predictions and accommodation of known facts played in persuading scientists to accept scientific discoveries. He systematically examined textbooks and comprehensive chemistry reference works, observing that, “[the] number of explicit references to the periodic law to be found in late nineteenth-century chemistry journals is small and fluctuates irregularly.” Relying on a survey of textbooks and reference works written between 1871 and 1890 and existing in American libraries, he concluded that the periodic law had been generally accepted in the United States and Britain by 1890. In a footnote to the same paper, he suggested the need to extend this study of texts to other countries, especially Germany and France. In fact, two years before Brush’s paper was published, Ludmilla Nekoval-Chikhaoui had completed her dissertation on the diffusion of Mendeleev’s periodic classification in France. She studied this subject as part of a project on the diffusion of scientific knowledge from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Basing her examination on scientific journals and chemistry books, Nekoval-Chikhaoui analyzed the diffusion of the periodic system in the French scientific community. She also surveyed the introduction of periodic classification in higher and secondary education based on an analysis of chemistry textbooks, higher education courses, and public education programs. At the end of her dissertation, she called to conduct a comparative analysis of the diffusion of Mendeleev’s discovery in different European countries.

In this chapter, I shall try to advance our thinking about college and university education in the United States through a critical study of contemporary conceptions of the academic vocation. Current reflection upon the state of higher learning in America makes this task at once more urgent and more difficult than it has ever been since the rise of the modern research university. Consider, for example, former Harvard President Derek Bok’s 1986–87 report to the Harvard Board of Overseers. On the one hand, Bok repeatedly insists that universities are obliged to help students learn how to lead ethical, fulfilling lives. On the other hand, he admits that faculty are ill-equipped to help the university discharge this obligation. “Professors,” Bok writes, “. . . are trained to transmit knowledge and skills within their chosen discipline, not to help students become more mature, morally perceptive human beings.” Notice Bok’s assumptions. Teaching history or chemistry or mathematics or literature has little or nothing to do with forming students’ characters. Faculty members must therefore be exhorted, cajoled, or otherwise maneuvered to undertake this latter endeavor in addition to teaching their chosen disciplines. The pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue are, for Bok at least, utterly discrete activities. To complicate matters still further, the Harvard faculty, together with most faculty members at other modern research universities, would very probably resist the notion that their principal vocational obligation is, as Bok suggested, to transmit the knowledge and skills of their disciplines. They believe that their calling primarily involves making or advancing knowledge, not transmitting it. How else could we explain the familiar academic lament “Because this is a terribly busy semester for me, I do not have any time to do my own work”? Among all occupational groups other than the professoriate, such a complaint, voiced under conditions of intensive labor, is inconceivable. Among university faculty members, it is expected. Never mind the number of classes taught, courses prepared, papers graded, and committees convened.

By the end of World War I, the basic structures of undergraduate medical education in both Europe and America were largely in place. Future practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic now began their training with a lengthy preparation in liberal studies, with special attention to physics, chemistry, and biology, then studied for two or more years in laboratory based courses in the preclinical medical sciences followed by a like period of clinical study, and finally spent at least a year in acquiring practical, hands-on training in a hospital. With few changes, except for the growth of postgraduate education, this basic pattern prevailed everywhere in the interwar years before 1945. In the transatlantic nations, in short, these were years of consolidation of patterns formed well before 1914. The study of medicine now consumed a minimum of five years beyond the school-leaving or college experience and frequently took six to ten years to complete. Except for the hospital schools of London, nearly every medical school in the Western world was attached to a university. Almost no school of medicine was without its teaching hospital where training students was a primary concern. Governments everywhere played an ever larger role in setting basic requirements and providing financial support of medical education. Physicians’ associations became more and more powerful and sometimes dominant in setting standards of education and licensure. And in these postwar years, the practice of medicine became an almost wholly middle-class occupation, exacting high standards of preparation and social expectation and open to only the most exceptional among the less affluent. The costs of study were rising so steeply that it was largely unavailable to the poor, even in the United States. The national differences of a quarter-century before, though evened out in many particulars, were still discernible in 1920. The war, after all, permitted no major changes in instruction, equipment, or curriculum in Europe, and reform efforts after the war were hampered by the need to restore and rebuild.

At the end of secondary education, the students of the United States are behind most advanced countries in science and mathematics. The main problem lies in the fact that the United States education system does not have a clear focus in their teaching of math and science through primary and secondary schools. According to the United States Department of Education, only 22 of the 50 states in the U.S. require that three years of math and science be taught in order to graduate from high school. This puts students of the United States at a disadvantage against the rest of the competitors on the g