For 20 years Frank von Hippel has been a thorn in the side of the American
political and industrial establishment. His forte is exposing the way in
which science and scientists are manipulated by these establishments. Part
of his method is to provide accessible, informative analyses of controversial
issues which provide ammunition for nonscientists who refuse to be bamboozled
by the authorities.

In Citizen ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, von Hippel documents many examples of scientists
being used to lend an appearance of objectivity to decisions motivated by
political self-interest or financial gain. In the guise of so-called ‘advisers’,
these scientists report to those who stand to benefit from certain outcomes,
and neither their data nor their reasoning are made public. In this way,
their paymasters can get away not only with presenting spuriously validated
conclusions, but also with dismissing citizens’ concerns as ‘uninformed’.

And why do the misrepresented experts not speak up? They keep quiet
because they are required by their managers to compromise their principles
– or get out. Von Hippel quotes a survey of American engineers in which
half of those taking part felt ‘restrained from criticising their employer’s
activities or products’. More than 1 in 10 felt that they were ‘required
to do things which violated their sense of right and wrong’.

The book documents such abuses of science in many different areas. To
quote just one, reports confirming that the defoliant 2,4,5-T causes birth
defects were continuously shelved during the time that enormous quantities
of the chemical were being used to strip bare about an eighth of South Vietnam.
As the US government was reassuring the public that there was no danger,
it was concealing relevant information.

There are similar stories to be told about invalid conclusions being
presented for the Strategic Defense Initiative, nuclear power stations,
airport runways, food additives, and heavy, inefficient, polluting vehicles.
We could add our own home-grown examples: uncontrolled testing of a bogus
AIDS drug on Romanian babies; the selling of nuclear power as the greenest
energy source; and the quasi-scientific lobbying of the meat, tobacco, sugar,
pharmaceuticals and motor industries.

Von Hippel clearly subscribes to the conspiracy, rather than the cockup,
school of explanation. His solution is, therefore, to promote support and
encouragement for troublemakers and whistle-blowers. Rachel Carson is the
patron saint of this subversive union, almost martyred as she was by the
orchestrated vilification that followed the publication of her book, The
Silent Spring, in 1962 up to her death two years later. Von Hippel argues
forcefully for clear, direct communication between scientists and the citizens
whose wellbeing is ultimately at stake.

But what is missing from this catalogue of villainy is any analysis.
Why is it that relatively few scientists are keen to talk to the public
– and relatively few citizens are eager to listen? Why are both professionals
and laypeople so vulnerable to the kind of epistemological fraud that von
Hippel reminds us is rife? The answers must lie in the attitudes to science
that are instilled in both groups by their socialisation, and particularly
their education.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s are bred to treat their knowledge as arcane. Generations
of graduates entering teacher training, for example, find themselves unable
to talk about science or even to convey their enthusiasm. Many can do no
better than to fall back on the textbook formulations that they themselves
learnt at school. Worse than this, their initiation into the world of professional
science as scientists taught them that it is possible, indeed proper, to
leave their qualms and values as human beings outside the laboratory door.
So while they trade in facts and ideas, it is someone else’s job to look
at their work in the light of principles and ideals.

This illusory separation of knowledge and skill from decency creates
the routine abrogation of responsibility that the moguls exploit so happily.
On weekdays, scientists may solve technical problems to do with the development
of high-yield crops, but on weekends they tend their gardens and bemoan
the lack of butterflies. They see no connection and feel no conflict.

The rest of the population is exposed at school to homeopathic doses
of science, small injections that seem almost designed to stimulate the
development of immunity against any further interest in the subject. Having
discovered that science is boring, remote, fragmented and hard, millions
of people are effectively programmed to switch off when the subject comes
up.

So the problem is not one that can be solved by a handful of whistle-blowers:
it has to be addressed by a legion of educators. Von Hippel has done a valuable
job in diagnosing acrucial disease. For the etiology and the cure we shall
have to look a little deeper.

Guy Claxton teaches at Schumacher College in Devon. His book Educating
the Inquiring Mind: The Challenge for School Science was published by Harvester/Wheatsheaf
in September.

Widely reported surveys such as that by John Durant at Imperial College,
and the Department of Education and Science’s 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 don’t know a virus from a bacterium, think that car fumes cause ozone
holes, and won’t 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 don’t 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 3 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 of broken bricks rather than the developing
structure, built on solid foundations, that they were promised.

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 is add a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

The second issue which won’t 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. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s 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 ‘It’s where 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 asked 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 – one’s own as well as
other people’s. 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 else’s 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
won’t happen till it is too late.

Guy Claxton teaches at Schumacher College, Devon. His book Educating
the Inquiring Mind: The Challenge for School Science is published by Harvester/Wheatsheaf.