Britain has at last escaped the illusion that salvation lies in mass science

Making the subject compulsory has been a failure - it is right that it should be a specialism for the interested few

Simon Jenkins
Friday October 13, 2006
The Guardian

In David Hare's National Theatre play Galileo the actor Simon Russell Beale rants and shouts for three hours at an exasperated pope about the importance of science. I do not normally cheer the papacy, but by the end of the play I was on its side. The pope had been happy to debate his ideas, but the man simply would not shut up.

Last week a new GCSE syllabus, titled Twenty First Century Science, came into use in a third of schools and was greeted with a similar rant from self-serving scientists. It moves away from test tubes and bunsen burners, towards an understanding of such topics as global warming, GM foods, vaccination, pollution, health and diet. It starts with the science of everyday life and delves into the technicalities only for pupils who are interested. It is "right way round" education.

The backwoods promptly howled that this was subjective, not objective science. It would "leave students poorly equipped to study science at A-level and university", apparently the be-all and end-all of education. Baroness Warnock protested that the new syllabus encouraged debate and "is thus more suitable for the pub than the classroom". Sir Richard Sykes, head of Imperial College London, played the old trump that it would "disadvantage state-school children" in getting into his university. "Britain needs more scientists," they all chanted. What they really mean is that their departments need more applicants or they will lose government grants.

At times my heart swells with pride at Britain's young. For nearly a quarter of a century they have had to confront this academic vested interest boring them to tears by drilling them, in effect, as press-ganged university lab assistants. They have shrugged, packed their satchels and walked away. Now at last - with the agreement of the Royal Society and the Association for Science Education no less - the new syllabus offers them science they might one day use.

The compulsory-science lobby began in the early 1980s by asserting its centrality in the national economy and declaring "a crisis" in maths and science teaching. There was no evidence for this, but the Thatcher government took it hook, line and sinker. (Margaret Thatcher had abandoned science for law.) Kenneth Baker's 1988 national curriculum, with its 300 pages of regulations and 400 inspectors, imposed science on schools "to meet the manpower needs of the economy". Virtually half the school day was to be devoted to maths, science and technology.

Baker's concession to this lobby relegated history and geography to optional status and ignored such "life skills" as economics, law, health, civics and the environment. It was academic log-rolling disguised as economic necessity, like the Roman Catholic church struggling to keep itself supplied with potential acolytes. At the time, Russia was producing more qualified scientists than the rest of Europe put together, and little good came of it. What Russia needed was economists, businessmen, lawyers and anyone prepared to question received doctrine. Now Britain too fell back on the economic chimera that salvation lay in mass science.

The curriculum has been a quarter century of total failure. Even after five years the number of pupils taking science GCSEs had fallen by 10%, and the number taking in physics, chemistry and biology were down by 16%, 14% and 10% respectively. Physics and maths A-levels fared no better, also down by 10%. University students were voting against science with their feet, and the insults heaped on them were extraordinary. Ministers and the media jeered at them for taking soft options, epitomised by business and media studies. Universities were penalised for teaching what students wanted, with a cut in arts grants per capita and an increase in science ones. Desperate academics opened their doors to lower-grade applicants for science courses, diluting quality and demoralising their departments. Nobody other than students noticed the shift in the jobs market towards law, accountancy, marketing, computing, management and media skills. Baker's curriculum was manpower planning gone haywire.

The science campaign left an entire generation of British pupils with an education they neither enjoyed nor could use. Each year the numbers doing non-compulsory science in schools declined. In the past decade alone university science departments have shrunk by between a third and a half. Only where market demand is clear - as in medicine - are departments oversubscribed and doctors in surplus. The most vocational university in Britain, the 25,000-strong University of Central England in Birmingham, now teaches no maths or science at all. Even old-fashioned universities are closing chemistry and physics departments (to howls from fundamentalists). The game is up.

The shrewdest essay on British education is still Lytton Strachey's debunking of the Victorian reformer Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby. Strachey pointed out that Arnold's invention of the modern public school was a sales pitch to the new middle classes on the moral virtues of boarding. Children would be spiritually and socially secure in his school - and regularly thrashed. On the curriculum Arnold was reactionary. Having challenged the old regime institutionally, he told his tutors and ushers to teach traditional subjects.

As a result, said Strachey, "the monastic and literary conceptions of education, which had their roots in the middle ages, he adopted almost without hesitation ... devoted to the teaching of Greek and Latin grammar". While 19th-century Germany, France and Russia were racing into technology, Britain stuck with the classical "greats". Arnold's curriculum dominated British education until well after the second world war.

The 1988 national curriculum has been as stuck-in-the-mud as was Arnold's. Its archaic motto could be "What was good enough for me ... " Maths and science have merely replaced Latin and Greek as the dogma of the academic establishment, for whom schools are no more than tributary outposts. My own science O-level included trigonometry, advanced algebra and differential calculus, and related them to physics, engineering, statics and dynamics. I can not remember any of it, nor have I found the slightest use for it. I imagine more people use Latin than trigonometry. Maths teachers have joined classicists in that last refuge of educational sophistry, that the very uselessness of subject is good "mind training".

Today anyone who claimed that Britain "needs" more accountants, lawyers and marketing experts, because they are most in demand and highly paid, would be laughed at. To decry science teaching is like telling a church it does too much religion. Yet even the government is hypocritical. The people Gordon Brown and his colleagues recruit extravagantly each day are not scientists but management consultants, bankers, computer salesmen and business administrators. Young people are not dumb. They can read job advertisements and the skills required.

If I were a scientist or mathematician I would plead for my subject to be optional after primary school. I would crave it as a specialism for the highly motivated, like classics or medicine. I would want no army of sullen recruits telling the world that my subject was "boring". Science should claw back its 19th-century glamour. The new syllabus does that, accepting that mass science has shot its bolt. It returns this challenging subject to what, for the majority, should be its proper place, the land of curiosity and wonder.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

Dunes and Dust in Arabia Terra

The battered region of Arabia Terra is among the oldest terrain on Mars. A dense patchwork of craters from countless impacts testifies to the landscape's ancient age, dating back billions of years.

In eastern Arabia lies an anonymous crater, 120 kilometers (75 miles) across. The floor of this crater contains a large exposure of rocky material, a field of dark sand dunes, and numerous patches of finer-grain material, probably dust. The shape of the dunes hints that prevailing winds have come from different directions over the years.

This false-color image, made from frames taken by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, shows the center of the crater's floor. The image combines a daytime view at visible wavelengths with a nighttime view at infrared (heat-sensing) wavelengths, thus giving scientists clues to the physical nature of the surface.

Fine-grain materials, such as dust and the smallest sand particles, heat up quickly by day and cool off equally quickly at night. However, coarser materials - bigger sand particles, gravel, and rocks - respond more slowly to the same daily cycle.

This means that when THEMIS views these late in the martian night, they appear warmer than the pools and patches of dust. In the image here, areas that are cold at night appear in blue tints, while the warmer areas show in yellows, oranges, and reds.

Location: 26.7N, 63.0E Released: 2006/02/07 Instrument: VIS Image Size: 37.7x34.2 km, 23.4x21.3mi, 2092x1907 pixels Resolution: 18m (59ft.)

Eruption of Augustine Volcano, Alaska

The Augustine Volcano was continuing to erupt, spewing ash, steam, and gases high into the atmosphere, when this image was acquired on January 30, 2006. The eruption began on Friday, January 27.

The volcano is located on an uninhabited island (of the same name, Augustine), located at roughly the center of the image; the plume that its eruption caused begins in the center of the image and trails towards the upper right corner.

This volcano is very active, and combined with its proximity to Anchorage, is one of the more serious natural hazards in the state of Alaska. Ash poses a health risk as well as a danger to navigation, hence the closure of local airports earlier in the week.

Previous major eruptions of the Augustine Volcano occurred in 1976 and 1986; the latter eruption blew ash into the air upwards of 14.5 kilometers (9 miles). The series of islands for which Alaska is famous is a part of an island arc, a string of volcanoes that form above what geologists call a "hot spot". The plate (on which the islands currently rest) moved over a column of hot magma or liquid rock and the islands were formed as the magma cooled into volcanic rock.

Augustine is a "stratovolcano", a large, conical mountain formed from lava flow and volcanic ash. Just under half of all volcanic eruptions in the last 10,000 years have been from stratovolcanoes -- including Mt. St. Helens in 1980 and 2004-2005.

Credit: Jeff Schmaltz; MODIS team; NASA

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