The Relevance of Biology
Discussion Topic 8

Posted for the week of May 28, 2000. Submit your discussion contribution to your section's e-mail address. Your contribution will go to each of the members of your discussion section and you will receive their contributions. A discussion of contributions is encouraged, however, please keep your comments civil and don't harass one another. Your discussion contribution is due no later than 3:00 on Tuesday, June 6.

The following article deals with the relevance of biology to everyday living. Please comment.

From New Scientist, Volume 154, page 28, May 17, 1997. New Scientist, by the way, has an excellent web site and has numerous articles that might interest you.

You are charged with irrelevance...
By Jonathan Osborne

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 the 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 great 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 it's 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 ¹, 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 school children 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?

¹ For a contrasting view, you might wish to examine chapter 3 (page 42), The Cultural Construction of Cultural Constructivism, in Gross and Levitt's book, Higher Superstition. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1994.

This is a scholarly response to post-modernism and critical theory as they treat the sciences. Not light reading, but certainly fascinating stuff.

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