Britain's science problem

The most alarming aspect of the government’s “Covid-19 alert” equation, and the graph that accompanied it, is not that both are meaningless twaddle, but that apparently no one involved in the process of devising them was sufficiently literate in science or maths to notice. (This assumes, of course, that it was not simply a matter of no one daring to speak up.) Nothing has signaled more clearly that for some of the key personnel charged with handling the most serious medical crisis of our times, science is a system of gesture rather than the acquisition and quantification of reliable knowledge.

Yet some of us compelled during lockdown to engage more closely with what our children are learning at school have been given a glimpse of how such attitudes arise. I have been regularly coming across questions in my daughter’s GCSE maths and science work that totally stump me.

Having a degree in chemistry and a PhD in theoretical physics, I’d like to think I could handle this stuff. But some of the questions leave me utterly baffled about what answers are expected. Occasionally I have put it to the public by posting the questions on Twitter. The range of answers, many from professional scientists, has been illuminating and sobering. Often, the scientists simply say the questions are bad or silly ones. Some schoolteachers, on the other hand, confidently explain what the answer should be — with, I’d informally guess, around a 50-50 chance of agreeing with one another or getting the approved answer (which is sometimes an incorrect one anyway).

The most immediately helpful responses are those from teachers who explain that they have taught this part of the syllabus recently and so know what’s expected from the pupils. Some of them admit with resignation that much of what they end up teaching is not really science or maths but how to provide the answers needed to get good marks. One, who said he had taught for over 30 years, sighed that, “School physics is not really about physics. It’s all about information handling. As are all GCSEs.”

More worrying are the teachers and educators who don’t see this as a problem at all. Relax, they say, the kids will know how to answer it because we’ve told them. And if professional scientists take issue with that answer, who cares? Most of these kids aren’t being prepared for a life in science, and they’ll get the proper dope in due course if they are.

In other words, exams seem not so much to be testing learning as dictating it. The answers are sometimes prescribed not from scientific or mathematical reasoning, but by diktat. How else could we end up in a situation where professional physicists cannot answer questions in physics set to schoolchildren?

Is it any wonder, then, that when people graduate from school and come across a problem — in, let’s randomly suppose, epidemiology or virology — that needs actual (if only basic) understanding of how science and maths work, they haven’t a clue? It’s entirely forgivable that they don’t know the science itself, but far more problematic that they seem unaware of the extent of what they don’t know. This is probably the root cause also of many conspiracy theories that have flourished around Covid-19; the idea that the 5G network might be implicated, for example, requires the same kind of “magical universe” thinking as astrology.

This is not to imply that teaching of science in school is bad. Much of it is excellent, and I’ve been delighted to see my daughter being taught topics, such as genetics, that I never once glimpsed in my own education. The problem is that what often seems to be missing is the very essence of science: the idea that there are core principles that can be applied to work out answers to types of problem you’ve never encountered before. And that to get a clear answer, you need to have an adequate set of facts to work on — and if you don’t, then you simply can’t get the right answer until you do. And that being able to look things up will not help you if you lack that core understanding, and is not cheating but on the contrary often wise and necessary.

I was forced to think about these things while, for nigh on three years, my partner and I home-educated both our children. What, in the limited time I had available, did I want them to know about science? From out of that experience I am now writing a book that attempts to show how just three basic questions in the core sciences can lead you in the right direction to think about an immense range of questions (including how viruses do their dirty work). I had never intended that this book would by itself get kids through their GCSEs. But now I realise that my approach is in some ways orthogonal (or perhaps even antagonistic) to that goal. My worry is that, as with some of those peculiar GCSE questions, too much knowledge and understanding might sometimes actually be a hindrance. If you’re confident enough to figure out the answer for yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll find your way to the “wrong” one.

This problem of syllabuses that defy professional norms is not by any means confined to STEM subjects. Professional writers were as baffled as everyone else when primary children began to be taught grammatical terms such as the “fronted adverbial” — and for good reason, for this one was invented purely for teaching and was absent from the writer’s vocabulary.

A far more dismaying aspect of the English literature curriculum is that pupils are now expected to memorise passages from the set texts (such as An Inspector Calls or A Christmas Carol) which they can regurgitate in their essays. This is not merely a waste of cognitive capacity; it is actually antithetical to good practice in literary criticism. The idea that any scholar would analyse a text without having it to hand is absurd, and traduces the whole aim. This practice is literally testing the wrong skills.

That is the same in science too. In my book, I refer to a test devised in the 1920s to assess applicants for jobs at Thomas Edison’s firm. It includes the question: “What is the speed of sound?” Legend has it that Albert Einstein, when asked, said he did not know and did not need to — he would look it up, as any good scientist would. I explain that it is far more commendable, and more scientifically literate, to be able to work out a rough estimate of the speed of sound from scratch by comparing how soon the sound from a distant lightning strike arrives after the flash, than to have learnt the value by rote. (Just assume that light, to all intents and purposes, arrives instantaneously.)

A capacity to remember information is not to be sniffed at. Nor is an ability to mechanically apply formulae and instructions, even if they are rather meaningless in themselves. (And no, splitting infinitives and starting sentences with conjunctions are not grammatical solecisms.) Life will sometimes demand those things of us, and it is no bad thing if school nurtures the discipline and focus required. What alarms me is that these things are sometimes being taught at the expense of actually learning the subject at hand: they masquerade as knowledge, while imposing an unnecessary cognitive load on pupils. Many, for example, leave school thinking that the “BIDMAS” order of operations in arithmetic is an integral part of maths, rather than knowing that good mathematicians would never write a sum or equation that needed it.

All too often these situations arise not because anyone has made a conscious judgement about the value of teaching something, but because teachers are told that “this is how things have always been done”. The same reasoning perpetuates the teaching of cursive handwriting: it might surprise and even alarm you to know that there are no proven benefits of it for most pupils, but drawbacks to some. The result is that alert, creative and engaged teachers often end up knowing that they are having to teach useless and even false information — but having no option to continue for the sake of exam results. They, as well as pupils, deserve better.

If you want to see one physics question that left me stumped, try this.

As for maths, how would you answer: 12 – 2 × 4 + 3 = ?