Is our science education right?
Abstract
Our 50th year was marked by terrible natural calamities that struck the Philippines, first by a 7.2-magnitude earthquake on October 15th, then by typhoon Haiyan on November 8th. Looming large on our horizon nonetheless is the Philippine Education Reform Agenda (PERA) and for this issue we decided to reprint an article originally published in The Carolinian as a follow up to our previous piece on educational reform in the sciences and mathematics.
The Philippine Scientist advisory board member Manuel P. Soriaga wrote this essay when he was still a second-year B.S. Chem. student at the University of San Carlos back in academic year 1967–68 when he was—in his own words—an “apoplectic college activist.” He has since obtained an American education and is a long-tenured professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University. He is currently on leave from TAMU and is a visiting faculty at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis based at the California Institute of Technology. This essay remains strangely relevant for our situation today, even if its echoes are removed nearly half a century ago.
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