Opinion - Let's give science a bad name in schools

Today, the UK's Royal Society announced its intention to stimulate a "world-class, high-performing education system for science and mathematics". If that's really what it wants, its members will have to give up a 60-year pursuit of a squeaky-clean image for science and scientists.

One of the biggest problems is that, although the subject fascinates elementary-school children, most lose that fascination between the ages of 10 and 14.

This is when adolescents are forming their sense of self. As young people seek to turn themselves into adults, they experiment with risk-taking, rebellion, deception, corner-cutting, questioning morality, coping with failure and suppressing self-doubt. This has strong repercussions for their response to science lessons.

Behind the scenes

Studies have repeatedly shown that teenagers lack interest in school science. Louise Archer, who researches the sociology of education at King's College London, puts it like this: there is "a mismatch between popular representations of science… and the aspirations, ideals and developing identities of young adolescents".

The key phrase here is "popular representations". The science of popular account is essentially a carefully crafted and unrepresentative distortion; as Nobel laureate Peter Medawar put it, "the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up".

Behind the curtain, scientists are surprisingly colourful. The world-changing ones are, by definition, anti-authoritarian, risk-taking rebels. The history of science is littered with instances of fighting, disregard of authority, dogged determination in the face of scorn and even that staple of teenage rebellion, wilful intoxication. Such behaviour seems to be inseparable from the creative pursuit of a breakthrough.

The problem is, school students only ever hear about the breakthrough itself. The crooked path to success has been whitewashed out of sight. This is not an accident: it is the result of a long-running PR campaign carried out by organisations such as the Royal Society – the creation of Brand Science, if you will.

Bad rep

It started after the second world war, which made science look terrifying. The atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the V2 rockets that rained down on London, the experiments carried out in Nazi concentration camps and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps – and Allied mustard gas experiments on their own soldiers – enveloped science in a cloud of fear. That was why the geneticist Jacob Bronowski wrote in a 1956 issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "People hate scientists. There is no use beating about the bush here."

Senior figures reacted by trying to put science in the best possible light wherever it might be on display. That is why UK organisations such as the Royal Society, the Royal Institution and the Wellcome Trust forged links with the national broadcaster, the BBC, in the late 1940s, controlling access to scientists and endorsing only those who would toe the line of Brand Science. Memos to the broadcaster, according to author Timothy Boon, forcefully suggested dropping the "perils and dilemmas angle" in its coverage of the subject, and concentrating on "the great solution wrought by the introduction of the experimental method".

Across the Atlantic, scientists were making similar public promises of the benefits that they would bring. For more than 60 years now, science has striven to be seen as trustworthy, morally upright, objective and dispassionate, and providing a well-defined path from hypothesis to experiment to deduction that will reliably deliver advances and improvements.

Introverts only

The unfortunate spin-off of this PR effort is that it made the subject look dull, inhuman and robotic. Perhaps that's why, when asked to pick out the scientists from a gallery of photographs, children chose the ones that weren't smiling – although in reality, all the photos were of scientists. Scientists are not perceived as smiley or fun, and the general population certainly does not think of them as creative or dynamic. That might explain why, as a Dutch study revealed in 2008, highly socialised, extrovert students tend to drop science subjects as soon as they can, orienting themselves instead towards more "human" areas of work, such as law, politics and economics.

Reintroducing into school curricula the humanity of science – with all its flaws, its tales of outrageous behaviour and even more outrageous characters – would give teens the opportunity to see scientists as role models. With pressing problems such as climate change and energy supply to confront, we must do whatever we can to capture the bold, adventurous, risk-taking minds of tomorrow, rather than settling for the timid ones – even if that means tarnishing the carefully nurtured public image of Brand Science.

Michael Brooks is a consultant for New Scientist and the author of Free Radicals: The secret anarchy of science

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