It is easy to find fault with political discourse in the

United States. The number of complaints that our system is broken, in proportion to the total population, is about the same as the number of complaints that our chemical education system is broken, in proportion to the number of chemical educators. But neither system shows signs of being fixed any time soon.

In a recent series of interviews, former vice president Al Gore has complained that politicians and the political system lack authenticity. In Gore’s view, politicians have been reduced to taking a series of positions almost entirely constrained by the politicians’ understanding of the views of their core constituencies. Significant improvements in social science techniques can now reveal the constituents’ preferences more quickly and accurately. Instead of taking a point of view and trying to convince voters to support that point of view, politicians ascertain an aggregate voters’ point of view and then try to mimic it. Reporters contribute to the problem by overemphasizing things such as how much money each candidate has raised and underemphasizing the educational role of describing and interpreting for voters the various points of view of candidates.

In one sense this is democracy taken to the nth degree. There is nearly instantaneous monitoring of the will of the people, and that monitoring determines what is done politically. On the other hand, such a system allows for little, if any, change—there is almost no mechanism by which new, outside-the-box ideas can influence the system. We have the equivalent of evolution without random mutations and natural selection to provide for improvement, and so little or nothing changes.

I can see the same kind of thing in the marketing and branding of my own university. Experts in branding have interviewed students, alumni, staff, faculty, and others. Out of all this has come publicity about the university that focuses on alumni who are easy to relate to (translates to not extraordinary or highly successful). The marketers found that ads that featured the best and the brightest of the UW-Madison faculty were off-putting to viewers, so such ads were scrapped. Focusing on the ordinary is apparently more in line with general taste.

As an educator I find this approach appalling. The assumption appears to be that peoples’ minds are closed, never to be changed by logical arguments. So let’s just find out what the current aggregate view is and hew to it. Unfortunately, the better we get at finding the aggregate view, the worse such a system serves us. Without a mechanism for change, we will be outdone by other systems where improvements can and do occur.

Lest we smugly assume that this applies simply to politics, consider the state of college-level chemical education today. For at least the past 25 years there have been calls for change in the system—and lots of logical arguments for change, many of them published in this Journal—but little change has taken place in the aggregate of mainstream, high-enrollment courses. Why? Largely because what might be agents of change are often too well attuned to the will of the people. For example, textbook publishers use focus groups, questionnaires, and other social-science methods to determine what content potential adopters want their books to include. What they find is that very few respondents want significant change, except a lower price for the book. Consequently little change occurs, except that publishers have come up with custom, soft-cover versions that include only the content needed at a given institution, or online, downloadable versions that students can purchase a chapter at a time.

While such changes in delivery systems do benefit students a bit, much greater benefit would accrue if authors and publishers were freer to rethink course content and how it reflects what chemistry and chemists are doing today (and will do in the future). In conversations with young colleagues who are starting research careers, I am often asked why the textbook of which I am co-author does not include more about chemistry-biology connections, nanoscience and nanotechnology, atmospheric chemistry, and other topics that reflect the important work my colleagues are doing. Many of these are far more likely to be interesting and useful to current undergraduates than solving every type of KSP or other equilibrium calculation and getting answers that are wrong because activity effects are not included. There are many more examples in every current textbook. They are there not because of the perfidy of publishers and authors, but because that’s what experience has told publishers and authors the market wants.

When I said, “…we should carve out of our…courses time to discuss issues like global warming in greater depth”, it elicited the response that “General chemistry teachers should teach general chemistry.” This implies to me that modern applications of chemistry are thought not to be general chemistry. If they are not, they should be. Clearly we don’t have time to teach effectively everything that is in current general chemistry textbooks, but that does not absolve us of the responsibility to make informed decisions about how such textbooks should change. We could dispense with plenty of topics without harming our students. Let’s think more carefully about course content, make difficult choices, and improve what our students experience.

John Moore is editor of the Journal of Chemical Education and PI of the Journal of Chemical Education Digital Library.