International I Hate Sports Club

Last night on my local New Jersey (NJN) television station there aired a program about the history of chemistry education. They described how commercial chemistry sets from the 1950s and 1960s had all sorts of important and cool experiments. They really taught chemistry.

I can testify to this: I myself had a chemistry set, in the early 1970s, and chemical experiment books. My father and I performed many of those experiments. My chemistry set was a combination of store-bought chemicals from Edmund scientific and cool, antique chemistry equipment my father had inherited from his college days in the 1940s from Virginia Polytech Institute (VPI) in Blacksburg, VA.

This NJN television program showed the chemistry sets sold today. None of them has anything you cannot buy for your kitchen, e.g. vinegar and baking soda. These new chemistry sets are completely lame.

One current high school or trade school chemistry teacher bemoaned the decline of students majoring in chemistry. He pointed to the extreme safety precautions taken for educational chemistry, either in shcool or chemistry sets sold to children, in spite of there never having been any significant history of accidents.

He then went on to contrast this with the astronomical rise in injuries due to high school football.

I have always wondered why people play American football, as people run at full speed towards each other, that is one way of screwing up your head. I sppose Chemists have to think about what they do and use their heads, while football players ust use their heads to ram other people. In any case it shows that Chemists are head and tails above football players.

Interesting post, resolvent. I wasn't aware that there has been a decline in the percent of students majoring in chemistry. Definitely not good for our country, which seems to be in a decline overall.

I did not mean to sound like I agree with everything this person on the NJN television network said. I agree with the implied irony about safety of sports vs chemistry for children. I do not agree with a lot of the implied rhetoric about "there not being enough chem majors": I especially believe that is bullshit if they mean "not enough chem majors to fill jobs". What jobs? There ARE no jobs! Nevertheless, the value of a degree, and of chemistry degrees in particular, goes way beyond what dumb employers can think to hire college graduates for.