Why does so much school science fail to appeal to students? One culprit is
the curriculum itself, according to the results of focus groups conducted with
16-year-olds. Pupils complain about repetition—”doing” electric circuits
to death, for example, or studying photosynthesis so many times that they never
want to look at another plant again. For them, the curriculum seems full of “old
stuff” with “nothing updated”. Even their grandmothers “remember learning this”.
Too often science appears to be a taught “parrot fashion”, where “everything
seems to be either right or wrong”. And this is in marked contrast to the
controversies and confrontations that characterise much of the science that gets
reported on the television and in the press.

The emphasis on “facts”, such as Newton’s laws or the difference between
mitosis and meiosis, means that the practice of science—its processes and
its risks and benefits—don’t get much of a look in. In focusing on the
detail, the “bricks” of scientific knowledge, a sense of the beauty, wonder and
amazement of the whole just gets lost. Consequently, too many pupils end up with
the feeling that science is just that—a pile of bricks—far too
difficult to make sense of and best left to the boffins in the scientific
elite.

Such concerns have swung the spotlight on science in our schools. Surely the
emphasis on “facts” has to be reduced by covering less and uncovering more? We
should be more concerned with how today’s scientists do science rather than
those of yesteryear. Pupils need to get out of their classrooms to meet real
scientists, real problems and modern equipment. Likewise, scientists must get
out of their enclaves and into our schools to explain what it is that they do
and why it matters. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s emerging from their labs once a year for a
science week is a start but more is needed. We risk perpetuating the stereotyped
and damaging image of the scientist as the mad, white-coated boffin.

And isn’t it time to give up on the absurd notion that there is a single
science with one universal method? Many of the media reports about science, for
example, are based on epidemiological findings—a method which bears as
much relation to the school science “fair test” as water does to wine. As for
the “facts”, we need to emphasise building up the pupil’s scientific knowledge
from the top down rather than from the bottom up. The popularisers of science
have got the message—start with the outcomes not the axioms, and with
something that is a puzzle. So, for instance, how are all the substances in the
world produced from just 92 elements? Or, why do you look like your parents? The
message is simple: engage your audience first and then fill in the detail once
they are hooked.

We also have to acknowledge that we live in a humanistic
culture—people, and especially young people, are interested in other
people, what makes them tick, what they should do and how they should act. For
example, Rosalind Franklin, a rival of Watson and Crick in the search for the
structure of DNA, is just a name in a textbook for most biology students. But
she becomes much more human when you learn that she circulated black-edged cards
announcing the death of the DNA helix after witnessing one of Watson and Crick’s
early and erroneous models. It is this kind of story that science education must
use to engage its audience, rather than force-feeding them the “dried fruits” of
scientific knowledge.

And that, after all, is what really matters—that pupils emerge with an
interest in science, a confidence to talk about it, and a willingness to engage
with science wherever and whenever it crosses their paths. At least Plutarch had
the right idea. Two thousand years ago he saw that “the mind is not a vessel to
be filled, but a fire to be kindled”. Let’s hope that some of the positive
changes to the curriculum currently being implemented in Britain, the new
post-16 science courses in Holland and the benchmarks for science education in
the US and elsewhere might kindle a few more fires.

AS we escaped from a recent American education conference, a colleague told me about a pupil in Germany who had decided to sue his school for providing an irrelevant science education. The story set me thinking about the kind of case a British litigant might mount.

At heart, the aggrieved student would be asking: “Who should science education serve?” In the 1980s, international rhetoric clamoured to improve the quantity, if not the quality, of science education—an idea neatly encapsulated in the slogan “Science for All”. Economic assumptions figured large in the rationale behind this change —based on a belief that an increase in the number of scientists would lead to enhanced economic performance. The proponents of the policy thought along similar lines to the IBM slogan which stated that “Nobody ever went broke by buying IBM”, and assumed that no country ever went bust by providing more science education.

In Britain, as in New Zealand, Canada and other countries, this rhetoric has been successful in achieving more time in the curriculum for science and greater breadth. But is this a hollow victory? Despite the changes, the core concepts delivered by the National Curriculum are considered by students to be no more than a litany of difficult and irrelevant notions. Our litigant might well ask why he or she needs to know Ohm’s law, or use Bunsen burners, ticker timers and microscopes when they are never going to touch one again in their lives?

He or she might even administer the coup de grâce, and ask of their teacher just how much of this science knowledge have you used in the past week in your everyday life? In other words, couldn’t pupils justifiably demand of their science education to just, for God’s sake, give it some relevance.

The evidence that pupils do ask such questions and find their science education wanting is to be found in numerous research studies of attitudes towards science, and in the ever-declining numbers that choose to take physical sciences at A level. This year alone, the number of passes at A level fell by 8 per cent and 4.7 per cent for physics and chemistry respectively, even though the cohort taking A levels stabilised, and the numbers taking a mixed diet of sciences and humanities continued to expand. The situation is becoming so chronic that physics is in danger of achieving the image gained by Greek in the 1960s—a subject pursued only by the very clever or the slightly odd.

In fact, science enters our daily lives whenever it is contentious. So most people encounter science through socio-scientific issues such as Chernobyl, BSE, genetically engineered tomatoes and so on. Engaging in these debates requires not only some scientific knowledge but also some understanding of the nature of science, the nature of scientific evidence and an assessment of risk. Without such knowledge it is difficult to make judgments that transcend simplistic emotive responses.

And that’s the trouble with science education—it rarely gets even close to considering such issues. There is as much chance of finding contemporary science in the curriculum as there is of pinpointing the location of water in a desert. Instead, the only science presented is classical, uncontentious, unequivocal and unquestioned. Hence science appears to be detached and value free—squeaky-clean but deathly dull. In this way, years of effort to promote public understanding and interest in science can be murdered by a few dire science lessons.

If our potential litigant really wanted to put the knife in, he or she could ask a few nasty questions about the dominance of practical work and the teacher’s conception of science. After all, there is much more to science than “doing experiments”. Theoretical physicists would not touch anything resembling an instrument with a bargepole, evolutionary biologists decipher evidence from fossils, and epidemiologists simply look for patterns in data.

As for the nature of science, why does the curriculum persist in portraying science as if its fixed, certain and objective? After all, all the philosophers agree that there is no universal method of science. Harry Collins of the University of Southampton and a few other sociologists have made a good case for science as a socially constructed, contingent and contested product—which a glance at any edition of Nature or the British Medical Journal would seem to confirm.

Before our courts are crammed with schoolchildren pursuing such cases, it is time to sit down and have a serious think with a few knowledgeable and interested souls—an activity which the Nuffield Foundation has chosen to support over the next two years through a series of four closed seminars and three open meetings for science educators. In Britain, the view of many scientific educators is that we need to ask a lot of serious questions, such as what’s good or bad about science education, what might a relevant science education for the majority look like, and do we teach too much science too early?