An open letter to the principal of my college

I passed by the college from which I graduated today. I visited the area today and happened to be near my college, so thought of passing from in front of my college to refresh some of my memories. This is not to say I had any good memories. In fact I had only and only bad memories of the place, but I still wanted to visit the place because even though they were bad, they were mine. In spite of the fact that I still remember how horrific it felt to walk into an extremely smelly lab everyday, follow a set of procedures funnily called experiments, get my hands burnt with HNO3 and sometimes my bag too, or how hard it was to keep myself awake at 7:30 AM to listen to one of our professors talk discursively about some or the other law of physics or chemistry, it was a part of my life I felt strongly about and hence, they were memories I wanted to revisit. 
Later when I came home I started speaking about the mindlessness of it all. How all of the students waking up at 7, mixing chemicals or listening to profs learnt absolutely nothing about physics or chemistry or math. We were shown the procedure to hold the beaker while shaking it with one hand while slowly releasing the burette with the other hand to conduct a procedure called titration or to reproduce diffraction patterns etc. However none of these made us understand or even curious about the phenomena we were trying to observe, they were simply steps that we had to follow, in the exact order as prescribed and get the result exactly as expected, and funnily these were called 'experiments'. Is it hard to see the irony of it ?  An experiment is something the outcome of which you don't know, however in the Science lab we were told exactly what to do and exactly what result to achieve right down to the exact milli liter or the last micro gram. So I immediately felt like writing to the college principal so that he or she is a bit more considerate to any such student who walks into the college next time befuddled by what the college is trying to achieve through the lectures and labs. So here goes my open letter to the principal of the college from which I graduated. I had written a similar letter while I was in college, however that letter had originated far from personal angst rather than from a measured understanding of how things are wrong and how they could potentially be corrected. 

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am a former student of your college, and studied bachelors in science from the college a while back. I have always deeply thought about the nature of our education system and today I happened to pass by the college and a lot of thoughts and memories came back to me. Let me at the outset let you know that I was not one of your finest students, far from it I was one of those who just managed to scrape through exams and practicals. But despite being one of the poorer students of the class, I was quite frankly and at the cost of sounding a bit self serving, far more intelligent than what the grades and marks at college gave me credit for. My bad performance did not come because I was not hard working or I was not smart enough to regurgitate the material needed to get good grades in exams. The main reason for my bad performance was that I could not understand what and why we were doing what we were doing. Why did we mix chemicals in a certain way, what the formulae and the laws meant and what the chemical equations actually meant. But most important of all I was far more curious about how we as human beings acquired the knowledge. I did read a bit when I was growing up and gathered enough knowledge to understand that each and every concept that were being taught had a long history and real people behind them. People who often made very wrong guesses about what was going on, people who actually found interesting way to test their guesses, which were experiments in the true sense of the term as against the set of steps we had to follow as students in the name of conducting experiments. 

So many chemical equations that we were told about in the early morning lectures as one liners had a long history behind them, the people who discovered them found very interesting ways to arrive at them. It was not as if people could see carbon hydrogen and oxygen items with their bare eyes or with microscopes, mix chemicals having different proportions of them and viola we had a new chemical equation. If that was indeed the case then how was a student trying to keep herself awake at 7:30 AM supposed to make sense of chemical equations as if they were simple equations of arithmetic. Would you blame a student if she wants to miss these early morning lectures or opens her jaw wide to yawn ?

Or would you blame a student who just cannot connect to the so called experiments and get the exact results expected. Sir can you please tell me, is the college trying to make people who have good levels of dexterity or those who understand the framework of science, who can think independently, come up with their own hypotheses, then design and perform their own experiments to verify the hypothesis ? What kind of person trying to learn science does not have any curiosity or ability to come with original hypotheses ? 

Also does knowing how to hold the burette properly and how to shake the beaker makes for a good scientist ? Or does having the curiosity to know more about nature, make systematic guesses, then design experiments around the guesses and arrive at conclusions make for the foundations of a good scientific mind. Sir to be honest I feel the former set of skills makes for a good technician and not a good scientist.

Our society can benefit from having many more scientific minds even if we don't need more scientists. Anyway the mandate or the goal of bachelors in science cannot possibly be to train someone in how to become a technician but to lay the foundations of scientific thought. The degree BSc no longer holds any prestige, the people doing the degree are ones who could not get into professional courses, the people who complete the degree are not considered to be bright minds in general. Sir or madam my appeal to you is to think about this a bit more seriously, can we create an environment which brings out what is interesting in science by talking about stories from the history of science, by talking out the human faces behind the discoveries, by  talking about the flawed guesses that people made before coming to final conclusions, by talking about discoveries as if they were episodes of solving mysteries, by encouraging discussions instead of early morning lectures, and many more such things. You are far wiser than I possibly am and I am sure you can find many more ways to make science more interesting. But I understand as a principal of an established college you are governed by rules and have to remain in the system, also you may not have the time to re-invent the whole framework of learning, but the least I can expect from you is, that the next time a student walks into your college and who does not look too interested in the affairs of the college, or is unable to hold burette in the exact way you ask him to, or struggles to get the result of the experiment right down the last microgram, or mililiter, the least I hope is that such a student will not be ridiculed or mocked at like the author of this letter was many years back and like so many other students are when they look dazed and disoriented around during a lecture or a practical session.

Yours sincerely,

A Faithful former student