Practical Physical Chemistry in Technical Colleges

The purpose of practical work. That chemistry is a practical subject is a fact which teachers are sometimes forced or inclined to ignore. Laboratory work when undertaken by a class requires considerable organisation, is messy, consumes considerable amounts of chemicals and covers a comparatively small part of the syllabus in a given time. At the elementary level it might be possible to run a school chemistry course without practical work. Indeed it could be argued that, until ‘O’ level, the purpose of teaching chemistry is to introduce the pupil to the scientific outlook, and this is an argument which is too often supported by the natural limitations of time, money and space in our schools. In technical colleges, however, even this argument is inadmissible because chemistry is being taught, in the main, to students who will eventually use it or are using it at the laboratory bench.