I'm sorry, but that is a _very_ poor argumentation. In fact, it's just a rant.

Maybe I should let this pass but this essay really rubs me the wrong way. I would like to stress that the author is _not_ a chemist. That was obvious before he wrote it in his text. He does not have formal training in the discipline (art?) and thus his opinion should be taken with serious skepticism.

On the other hand, I am a (published) college trained chemist, specialised in computational/theoretical chemistry in grad school but I did go through a very good program with anywhere between 10-15 hours of lab work every week, every year. Contrary to the author, I remember the names of all the textbooks I used because I spent so much time with them. Really, the author seems frustrated with his own _very_ limited experience of chemistry.

There is a reason why we "follow recipes". Mishandling of chemicals can and do cause injuries. Labs do get blown up. For all of my education, entrance to any laboratory was conditional on passing a test. Every time. One would be evaluated by either graduate students or professors before being allowed in. If you did not know what you were going to do, how you were going to do it, why you were doing it, what you should expect to happen, along with any other necessary information deemed essential by the instructors, you would be refused access to the lab and consequently get 0 in the mandatory laboratory report. And accidents _still_ happened, sometimes innocuous, sometimes dangerous to the point of having to evacuate the lab for a few minutes.

Not all experiments were "cookbook laboratory work" either. From the very first lab session, students had agency in how you plan and execute your experiment. No two students held notes exactly the same, for example. And no two students researched the subject as much beforehand, something which was _very_ obvious during lab work. Sharing a laboratory with students who did not prepare properly is dangerous in a way you can't really grasp until you're three hours into a multi-step anhydrous synthesis, you need to act fast to add a reagent in your air-free setup and the student next to you flushes a syringe of oxalyl chloride[1] in the sink beside you.

We _did_ have to analyse unknown compounds. We _did_ have a lot of liberty in how we conducted experiments, as long as we prepared well and acted safely. Practicing balancing chemical equations is NOT useless as the author suggests. Contrary to what he seems to believe, empirical evidence is _all there is_. Theories have to conform to reality, not the other way around.

All in all, this is a very bad argumentation that _completely_ misses the point. The author is talking about general chemistry as if it defines a complete chemical education. In actuality, general chemistry is only the very most basic knowledge one needs to have to be allowed in a lab. Chemistry doesn't stop there.

I was ready to give the author a chance but he has shown himself to be unqualified to discuss the topic. Being a dilettante is fine but there is a mountain of work separating a dilettante and a professional. Nobody on HN would seriously consider a rant about the current state of Medical education written by someone who had 2 semesters of biology.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxalyl_chloride