National Science Week: Time for a brief history of science in schools

The author is a reader in French studies at Reading University.

WHEN I took the School Certificate Examination in 1947, I had to score 50 per cent in English, maths, one modern language and one natural science if I wanted to go on to Higher School Certificate at 18. I was poor at maths and science and had to sweat. Had I been born a few years later and taken the new O- and A-levels, I would have had to worry far less. For 40 years, English schoolchildren have enjoyed a freedom, unequalled by their European contemporaries, to concentrate on what interested them most.

Those of us in higher education responsible for student admissions have seen how certain academic departments and disciplines - particularly hard sciences and some languages - have foundered on the choices of young 'consumers' of education. The pattern of demand is predictable. So, too, are the consequences for the nation.

To reverse the decline in the study of sciences will require measures far more drastic and unpopular than the imposition of a national curriculum. There is one subject, however, not normally taught, from which all students could not fail to benefit, namely the history of mathematics and science.

This is something I wish I had been taught in the Forties, when science and history seemed to me to have no bearing whatever on one another and when I prided myself on being bad at the former, with an arrogance all too common among students of arts at the time. I certainly do not wish to idealise the teaching I received at my local grammar school, superior though it was, in many respects, to the secondary education of today. My fellow pupils and I understood that an educated person needed to know about history. But it never occurred to us that since the course of human history has been determined more than anything by the development of science and technology, our unrepentant ignorance of these was philistine.

One of the many arguments for such a common core to the curriculum is that it would resolve simultaneously two of the issues on which educationists seem most divided: whether or how a broad curriculum in science can be taught and what is the purpose and ideal content of school history.

The history of science and mathematics could not possibly replace history itself or the study of mathematics and science subjects, but it could bring a common purpose to them by illustrating the truth of R G Collingwood's contention that 'all history is the history of thought' and by demonstrating in the most cogent ways the growth of our understanding of the universe.

It is possible to relive the process of scientific discovery far more realistically than the life of a Saxon serf or an African slave in the classroom. This is because, although it required genius to make them, some of the most important discoveries of the past turn out to be simple solutions to complex problems.

If, for instance, you know how to add and multiply, you can see straight away what a service was performed to the human mind by the Indian and Arabian mathematicians who taught us how to count. Only the most elementary understanding of co-ordinates, as they are taught to 11-year-olds, is required to see how momentous was the discovery by Descartes of analytic geometry, which made possible the measurement of conic sections, and Newton's laws of universal gravitation.

No educated adult should have any difficulty in knowing why Galileo was right and his ecclesiastical judges wrong. The discovery of oxygen, independently, by Lavoisier and Priestley - victims, one of the French Revolutionary tribunal which condemned him to death for conspiring to asphyxiate the people of Paris, the other of an anti-revolutionary mob that burned down his house and laboratory - is another easily retraceable step in the history of human awareness. No specialised knowledge of biology is required to grasp the logic or the implications for Judaeo-Christian religions of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. No knowledge at all is needed to conduct the simple experiments in the popular 'hands-on' section of the Science Museum, where children find out for themselves that science can be fun.

More recent science is characteristically too esoteric for any but the specialist to retrace. The latest developments in astrophysics cannot be mentally relived by children as may the discovery of the first marvellously ingenious techniques for measuring the distance and diameter of the sun. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is a best-seller, but contains only one equation, which he hopes will not 'scare off' his readers. The most important contemporary developments could, nonetheless, perhaps be imaginatively perceived if historians were to point out not only what we think we know, but where we are ignorant as well.

This is part of the fascination, even for the layman, of unified field theory and the neurophysiology of the brain. It is not only the future explorer who may be thrilled by a map with areas marked terra incognita. An honest admission of scientific ignorance, in any case, is always preferable to a pretence of familiarity - and no humane study, least of all one devoted to the growth of reason, should require veneration for what is too abstruse to be understood. When this happens, respect for science becomes idolatry.

Ignorant superstition, meanwhile, is among the legacies of years of student choice from the age of 14. It is not science but science fiction and not philosophy or history but the occult for which booksellers increasingly cater. There may be better remedies than the one I have proposed for our deepening estrangement from our own intellectual heritage, but few have been offered by the scientific community.

If the situation is not remedied and the overwhelming majority of our citizens live out their lives unable even to share something of the knowledge of the European Renaissance, we will become as vulnerable to exploitation as the pre-Columbian Indians and the inhabitants of what we still, anachronistically, refer to as the Third World.