The ultimate aim of the movement has been to foster a more favourable
political climate that will encourage popular, and therefore government, support
for science and technology. To this end many scientific events and publications
have been generated in the hope of making science more attractive.

But this is to confuse people鈥檚 interest in and appreciation of science with
public attitudes towards it.

There is surely a flaw in the assumption held by PUS advocates, to wit, that
greater understanding of science will necessarily lead to informed participation
in decisions about contentious science issues. The sort of knowledge you need to
make informed assessment of, say, global warming is so extensive, and the models
so complex, that few scientists would be able to do it. And understanding of
science has nothing to do with democratic participation; decisions are
influenced most deeply by value judgements and personal experience. In the same
way, political ideologies are not formed from an in-depth knowledge of social
philosophy and economics but from much more personal preferences. 杏吧原创s are
no different from non-specialists in bringing their personal beliefs even when
it comes to complex technical matters.

Last summer, Derek Burke, a former regulator for genetically modified
organisms, tried to allay public fears about the safety of genetically modified
foodstuffs, stating that inserted genes are no more likely to escape than any
one of the 100 000 plant genes (Times Higher Education Supplement, 14
August 1998). The following week, another expert pointed out that there is much
evidence to show genes can escape to other plants. The lesson here that the
public needs to understand is that in scientific issues鈥攅specially if they
impinge on public policy鈥攖here can be strong disagreement between the
experts involved and there can be different levels of risk.

So, the public needs to come to grips with uncertainty and risk. But there is
every reason to suppose that in a post-modern world people have become used to
uncertainty. Maybe it is not the citizens who have the problem with science and
public policy, but scientists themselves. The public is not an undifferentiated
mass: people come to different judgments about issues because of the kinds of
lives they lead. Too often scientists reassure and try to be logical when it
would be better to own up and admit that they just don鈥檛 know.

The recent furore in Britain about whether or not the government has the
right to limit the use of vitamin B6 illustrates the problem. In the end, people
decide for themselves how much to take rather than responding to blanket
reassurance or blanket condemnation. What will make a difference is trust. And
there is no one more worthy of trust than an expert who can respond to people鈥檚
doubts in their own terms, express opinions but admit areas of uncertainty.

When my wife was pregnant with our second child, the radiographer told us
after the ultrasound that there was a risk of our child being born with Down鈥檚
syndrome. He carefully explained how he reached his conclusion, but made it
clear that his conclusion was only tentative and not all together reliable. Far
from being depressed, we both felt empowered: we had the information to prepare
ourselves. (Our baby does not have Down鈥檚 syndrome.)

Today we face many problems concerning the food and drink so vital to our
well-being and important areas of science policy. So SUP, 杏吧原创s
Understanding People, would be far more useful than PUS. 鈥淪up鈥� is a verb,
proactive and more wholesome, associated with imbibing tasty substances. But
before SUP, could we not have 杏吧原创s Learning to Understand the Responses of
People, SLURP?

The answers were鈥攁nd are鈥攗nconvincing. Expert gardeners tend to
use nous and experience; a formal scientific training does not necessarily a
good gardener make. Anyone can change a plug. You simply follow the little
diagram that comes with it. And people throughout the world have perfectly
healthy diets without knowing the difference between a protein and a
carbohydrate.

Science teachers (and I speak as one) tend to have a practical bent and like
to think their chosen subject is useful in an everyday kind of way. It is not.
And once that awareness comes about, and the pain has eased, new justifications
for teaching science have to be found. Science promotes rational thinking. A
scientifically informed citizenry is vital to a democratic society. Science is
essential for our economic prosperity and is an integral part of our culture. To
take the first point, there is no evidence that once outside their discipline
scientists think any more rationally than anyone else. In the second point, the
idea of a scientifically informed citizenry raises a host of intractable
questions: How well informed? Won鈥檛 some science be just too complex? Is it
knowledge of science that influences decisions or political imperatives? Third,
is science essential for our economic prosperity? Certainly, those who work in
our pharmaceuticals, food, biotechnology, engineering and chemicals industries
need a strong scientific training. Altogether though, no more than 20 per cent
of the population needs any science for their working lives. Finally, science as
taught in schools, is not part of our culture in the same pervasive way as the
arts and the humanities, which find a home in every sector of society. Science
is perceived at best as neutral and removed from the cares of most people, at
worst as dangerous.

So why is science on the school curriculum? After all, individuals can lead
prosperous and (arguably) contented lives in complete ignorance of science. But
at a deep and historical level our perceptions of nature have been radically
transformed by science. Evolutionary theory and atomic theory, for example, have
influenced our language, our thinking, our artistic and political movements.
Although many of us have pre-Newtonian concepts of motion, the sense of the
Earth as merely another planet slavishly rotating about the Sun would have been
inconceivable to most people living Galileo, and for some time after. No one
today is unaffected by science.

The justification for having science on the school curriculum is cultural in
a general sense. Science is part and parcel of our modes of thought and our
state of social and political progress. But how should the national curriculum
reflect this reasoning? First, the teaching needs to cover the core theories of
science, that is, the body of ideas that is relatively uncontentious. The
national curriculum fulfils this role but it should also look at some of the
manifestations of science in modern life, such as the role of chemistry and
biology in biomolecular engineering and drug development, new polymers and the
physical principles of some important technological artefacts.

I feel the main problem, however, is that the impersonal aspect of science
makes it unpopular. Everyone should be able to interpret science in the light of
their own experiences, and to have the opportunity to judge politically and
socially contentious issues when agreement between scientists is by no means
universal. This includes such issues as BSE, prioritising public money for
scientific research, nuclear power and carbon emissions.

There are also philosophical questions that underpin the role of science in
our society. Can scientific explanations be true? Should we teach, say, creation
theory as a science? Is science the driving force of Westernisation? From
courses which discuss the science involved in these issues, students should come
to appreciate that science cannot be applied unproblematically, and that
interpreting the evidence is a skilful, deeply complex and value-laden
process.

All students between the ages of 14 and 19 should have to follow a course on
these issues, whether they are studying science or not. It could be a component of
a cross-curricular theme but must be compulsory. There are, of course, some
practical problems鈥攕taff-training pressures, for example鈥攂ut without
such an approach science will continue to be mistrusted and feared, and its
teaching justified for all the wrong reasons.

Science had suffered at the hands of common sense. Despite this little
episode I went on to teach science, only to discover that common sense was
a mighty difficult obstacle to overcome. How can the Earth orbit the Sun
when the Sun pops above the eastern edge of the Earth in the morning, passes
above us and then sinks beneath the other side in the evening? Of course,
mouldy bread breeds fungi. Have you ever seen a fungus walk from one piece
of mouldy bread to another? And Galileo was talking a lot of hot air: everyday
experience tells you that a hod of bricks would fall faster then a feather.

Then there is the problem of experimental error. Take combustion as
an example to demonstrate the superiority of the Lavoisier oxygen theory
at the expense of the phlogiston theory that a substance, contained within
all combustible materials, is released during burning. So you weigh a piece
of magnesium in front of the class, burn it in a covered crucible and reweigh
it to show that the burnt product has a greater mass than the piece of magnesium
metal. Lo and behold! A cackle from 30 throats as the balance tells the
truth 鈥� the magnesium oxide weighs less. Anyway, comes the voice of common
sense, things burn away, don鈥檛 they? Children bring common-sense notions
to the classroom and the laboratory. They are learnt as a result of experience
and they are strongly held. Students may nod in agreement as you point out
the absurdity of spontaneous generation through well controlled experiments,
but 鈥榗ommon sense鈥� tells them otherwise.

Others have recognised the difficulties that common sense poses for
teaching science. For example, the Children鈥檚 Learning In Science Project
(CLISP), based at the University of Leeds, takes children鈥檚 intuitive ideas
and explanations as the starting point for teaching, and suggests ways of
guiding children to the accepted model through a process of negotiation
and discussion with teachers and peer group.

My four-year-old pupil believed that the Earth was flat. She was a city
girl and it was unlikely that she had ever seen many objects disappearing
below the horizon. As far as she was concerned, the ground beneath her feet
went on forever with the occasional bump in the form of a hill or mountain,
and there was a kind of security in this everlasting flat plate with its
friendly ball of fire coming to warm her every day. Making her realise that
the Earth was an egg-shaped object drifting through space meant subjecting
her to an emotional trauma.

Human beings of any age do not take kindly to the scientific process
of belief-shattering, as the ghost of Giordano Bruno may testify. He was
burnt at the stake about 400 years ago for dabbling in ideas about a Solar
System. Islamic scientists had to converse in gibberish to prevent their
ideas being taken amiss. Mere evidence does not help, either. Galileo may
have asked his contemporaries to look at the heavens through a telescope,
but they had a remarkable faculty for filtering out unwanted information.

If we are more sensitive to people鈥檚 resistance to conceptual shifts
nowadays, why do we make such an exception with children? Without so much
as a backward glance we trample upon their common-sense notions of the Universe
and expect them to take it sitting down. Have we learnt nothing from history
and Bruno鈥檚 combustible fate? CLISP has started to address that problem
but the nature of the beast is emotional as well as intellectual.

This is where empathy can intervene. In the National Science Curriculum,
the attainment target for 鈥榯he nature of science鈥�, encourages children to
develop their know ledge and understanding 鈥榦f the ways in which scientific
ideas change through time and how (they) are affected by the social, moral,
spiritual and cultural contexts in which they are developed鈥�. Not a word
about emotion.

I propose that we introduce an additional attainment target, which would
be a fusion of science, history and drama. Pupils would play characters
engaged in scientific revolutions, taking on the roles of the reactionaries
as well as the revolutionaries. Hypotheses would be formulated and challenged,
and pupils would be encouraged to reveal their characters鈥� feelings about
the changes in ideas. Children would learn that scientific knowledge is
something that is acquired as the result of a struggle, often political,
and is always open to challenge.

This new attainment target could be graded in terms of children鈥檚 psychological,
emotional and intellectual development. For example, pupils aged between
7 and 11, could express how they imagine a flat Earth, and what it would
be like to live on an infinite disc. Fifteen-year-olds could take the sides
of Creationists or Darwinists in the evolution debate. This programme should
not stop at school. I am willing to push for an empathic approach to science
from the nursery to the research institute 鈥� and beyond. Is anybody else?

Ralph Levinson teaches chemistry in London.