You can replace chemistry with math in his article (and he sort of mentions this in context near the end). I can't remember once being shown the physical problems that drove progress in math until I reached calculus. I remember being bored to tears in algebra 2, a class which was basically being taught as linear algebra + trigonometry. It wasn't until the following summer that I discovered 3d transforms, and a bunch of other applications of all that matrix manipulation and how all the sin/cos manipulation helped with RF electronics.
Back 25 years ago I was convinced that that entire class could have been taught as an extension of more concrete subjects (electronics, computer graphics, signals, etc) that simply weren't taught in the high school I went to, despite the fact it was what we now call a STEM magnet school. Classes I later wished I could retake, if only to pick up on all the math subtleties I mostly ignored because it all seemed so pointless.
Now that I have kids, I see that nothing has really changed. Sure they get a lot of "word problems", but the problems are so artificial they might just be worded as "what is the result of adding A and B and dividing by C" for all the natural concepts they get across.
Thankfully I had a pretty reasonable chemistry teacher, who did a lot of demos and gave us interresting experiments to keep the class from being a bunch of random facts.
Back 25 years ago I was convinced that that entire class could have been taught as an extension of more concrete subjects (electronics, computer graphics, signals, etc) that simply weren't taught in the high school I went to, despite the fact it was what we now call a STEM magnet school. Classes I later wished I could retake, if only to pick up on all the math subtleties I mostly ignored because it all seemed so pointless.
Now that I have kids, I see that nothing has really changed. Sure they get a lot of "word problems", but the problems are so artificial they might just be worded as "what is the result of adding A and B and dividing by C" for all the natural concepts they get across.
Thankfully I had a pretty reasonable chemistry teacher, who did a lot of demos and gave us interresting experiments to keep the class from being a bunch of random facts.