Why science is failing

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IT is unlikely that the current reforms in Britains school science curriculum will have much impact on two major problems the reluctance of the public to enter into informed debate about scientific issues of social importance; and the lack of social responsibility among scientist. Both of these have proved resistant to previous attempts to make school science more relevant and accessible to the majority of students who are not going to earn their living in science-related jobs, and there is no reason for optimism with respect to the present half-hearted and regressive changes required by the National Curriculum.

Widely reported surveys such as that by John Durant at Imperial College, and the Department of Education and Sciences Assessment of Performance in Science Unit, have shown how disabled the majority of the population are when it comes to learning and discussing science. Vast numbers of young people dont know a virus from a bacterium, think that car fumes cause ozone holes, and wont even read simple instruments such as stop clocks and manometers correctly. Yet many of these are people, the surveys tell us, who express interest in science, and who have been programming video machines effortlessly, and watching Horizon, since they were at primary school.

Clearly they dont lack the motivation (ghastly word), or (even worse) the ability. What they have acquired from school is a conditioned, and self-fulfilling, belief in their own inability to handle science intelligently--what the psychologists call learnt helplessness. They are ready, willing and up-to-a-point able to think scientifically unless they think that what they are doing is Science with a capital S, when the learnt helplessness reaction is tripped.

The traditional rigmarole of science education continues to squat unchanged at the centre of the new Science Key Stages and 4, lightly dusted with a coating of chattiness and relevance that serves only to confuse students even more when they discover its lack of penetration. They are told that what they are studying is a framework of understanding that is of unparalleled coherence, reliability and utility--yet in practice, for many of them, it boils down to a series of fragments that bears not at all on their own lives, and which resembles a pile or broken bricks rather than the developing structure, built on solid foundations, that they were promised.

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Small wonder that what they learn from this introduction to Lab-land is not the mole concept and the reactivity of metals, but that science is bitty, remote, boring and hard. They develop a disinclination to engage with matters scientific in the future, because when they were required to do so at school they ended up feeling bamboozled and belittled. Their exposure to science has functioned as a homeopathic dosage, immunising them against any further bouts of scientific interest. This immunisation is effective almost regardless of the skill or enthusiasm of the teacher. The best that teachers can do si add a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

The second issue which wont go away is the other side of the same coin. Those who master the strange, disembodied lore and laws of science can usually do so only by giving up the attempt to relate it to the substratum of tacit knowledge that informs the way they live. Scratch a physics undergraduate, the research shows, and you will readily uncover a rich layer of prescientific ideas, quite wrong by the standards of conventional scientific wisdom, that has managed to coexist with the sophisticated theoretical superstructure that is being assembled above ground. Scientists rarely change their minds as a result of their studies; they merely laminate them.

The problem that this leads to is one of disconnection, not of incompetence. As far as professional skill, or examination success, are concerned, it can be a benefit to keep your technical knowledge uncontaminated by everyday associations. Paradoxically, it is sometimes the students who insist on trying to relate their science to their lives who become most perplexed. When asked in a chemistry class to define a compound, it is the students who are having trouble who say Its wher you keep animals, and anyone who instinctively (and creatively) thinks that evaporation must be something you put in milk is surely lost. This is one of the reasons why science teachers are often flummoxed when they are aksed really simple questions, and tend to scurry back to the safety but obscurity of the time-honoured textbook formulations.

No, the problem is that values, common sense and human-heartedness live in the deeper strata of the mind, inextricably interwoven with everyday knowledge and expertise. Down at these tacit levels of mind, intelligence cannot be divorced from a concern with wellbeing--ones own as well as other peoples. Most people simply could not deliberately design and build a machine to hurt those they loved. But when a domain of problem-solving has been erected on a mental site that lacks connection to this infrastructure of everyday social responsibility, then anything goes. Creativity becomes unbridled, and it can be driven by the most short-term or the most self-centred of considerations, and justified with the most transparent rationalisations.

Career considerations can, therefore, outweigh ethical ones. The thrill of the intellectual chase can result in chemicals designed to burn flesh, or bins full of discarded rats. And this dissociation goes unnoticed by scientists. Weekdays they solve technical problems to do with the development of high-yield crops; weekends they tend their gardens and bemoan the lack of butterflies; seeing no connection, and feeling no conflict.

So success at science requires a kind of cognitive apartheid. Additionally, the initiation into professional science teaches students at a more conscious level that it is possible, indeed proper, to leave their qualms and values as human beings outside the laboratory door, and that, while they just trade in facts and ideas, it is someone elses job to look at their work in the light of principles and ideals. This spurious ethic reinforces the illusory separation of intelligence from decency and strengthens the routine abrogation of responsibility which profiteers and politicians so happily exploit.

No amount of tinkering is going to improve matters. More project work, nods in the direction of environmental education, and the like will be ineffective as long as they are grafted on to a syllabus preoccupied with the traditional core concepts of physics, chemistry and biology. Newtonian dynamics, photosynthesis, titration, electrolysis . . . the whole practical and conceptual apparatus of school science has got to be delayed until students have developed a confident, enthusiastic grasp on scientific thinking in everyday contexts.

If the formal definitions and procedures are introduced prematurely, their net effect will be to divide the school population into apathetic sheep and amoral goats. Yet the trend of the National Curriculum is to extend the reach of the formal approach ever further, so that it reaches into and begins to affect even the youngest in primary education.

The green debate tends to polarise into science-as-saviour versus science-as-devil camps. What is needed to move beyond these stereotypes is scientists willing to feel their concerns, and express them to the public; and a public which is willing to listen. Our present science education ensures these changes wont happen till it is too late

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