What is the point of learning science? - initial reflections of a science teacher

Science, in spite of being a method rather than a subject, is considered part of the core curriculum for UK school students. Students are expected to be initiated into a vast body of knowledge, recalling a relatively random selection of facts from the immeasurably huge set of information that has been discovered using the scientific method. Students are also expected to spend some time learning about how a scientific experiment is performed, and most likely having a go at a few.

This is taken for granted as a key part of a modern education, and is not commonly questioned. Although I believe that students do indeed need to study science in school, I think the focus is somewhat wrong-headed.

Some students will go on to study sciences at university. These students require a strong grounding in scientific principles, and a keen memory for the endless facts uncovered by hundreds of years of research. However, these students are in the minority.  A slightly larger share of students will study science A-levels. To be successful in these, they need a reasonable understanding of key concepts – like photosynthesis for biology, atomic structure for chemistry and the idea of an electron for physics. These concepts become assumed by A-level, and they underpin the content taught at this standard. However, again, these students are in the minority. This means that the need for simple knowledge of content is important for a number of children, but not most. For them, the point in learning science is always preparation for the next stage. The actual facts are not as self-evidently important to all other students’ lives as, for instance, vocabulary. For them, the majority, memorising scientific information is not really good use of their time.

So far, this sounds pessimistic about school science. Maybe so, but this is because the actual content of science at school is not very relevant to most children (why do they care about the composition of Earth’s atmosphere three billion years ago?). Science as a school subject, and indeed as a professional occupation, is generally presented by schools and in the media as an existing body of knowledge, a set of difficult facts, which can be learned verbatim if you choose.

In fact, the development of the scientific method has been arguably the greatest cultural revolution in the history of civilisation. Prior to the appreciation that testing an idea in controlled conditions, over and over, knowledge was unsystematic and predicated on a wise individuals’ personal opinion or impressions. The rise of the scientific method as the preferred window onto nature (and later, human behaviour and relations) led to a mind-bogglingly rapid development of our understanding of the cosmos and gave rise to technology that changes faster than most of us can keep up with. However, most students leave school still believing that science is a kind of authority (hence the terrible, annoyingly common, misleading and grammatically incorrect phrase ‘according to science’) that is able to pronounce on many issues of concern to us all, like human health and whether the Earth is warming up, but is often not the only opinion in the room. People (school leavers!) don’t appreciate that the scientific method is the most rigorous and most reliable path to truth on, I would argue, almost all avenues of human interest. Science is frequently presented as one truth among many options, with the opinion of more-or-less informed people being placed at the same level of importance. Thus, the ‘scientific perspective’ is offered as one opinion among many, where scientific evidence is pitched against personal perspectives, as though the two are comparable in validity. A classic example of this was the controversy (sic) surrounding the MMR vaccine, where ‘expert opinions’ were presented alongside the view of Cherie Blair and her dangerously ignorant life coach. The key problem with the media presentation of this was that the expert opinion seemed to be the personal notions of this old academic, rather than being conveyed as a statement supported by the very best evidence available – in this case, that MMR is completely safe. This example is instructive too, since it shows the danger of leaving decisions like vaccinating one’s child to ill-informed opinion – children who went unvaccinated have subsequently died from measles. In a way, it would be more useful to have the scientific evidence presented by a well-informed layman, rather than an academic. This would remind us that most scientific findings that pertain directly to our health are fairly easily understood by anyone prepared to take the time to read about them; one doesn’t need a degree in epidemiology or some such discipline. This would also remind us of the point made earlier: that an expert opinion is not worth anything unless the expert is interpreting the evidence correctly. The crucial thing is that properly collected scientific evidence leaves virtually no room for personal opinion, and this is what sets it apart.

So, in school, students need to develop a far more thorough, deeper and broader understanding of what the scientific method entails, why it is the gold-standard of evidence collection (there is even a ranking system for the quality of data based on the type of methods used, with randomised, double-blinded, controlled trials being the ideal for any health intervention), how to interpret the results of scientific endeavour and how to unpick a piece of scientific research. This is difficult. School science experiments tend to be very discrete, in that students are given a set of equipment to find out a particular piece of information; with any luck, their findings match the theory and everyone goes home happy (most especially the science teacher). This approach is very useful for teaching students that carefully changing only one variable, assiduously keeping all other factors the same, and measuring the impact on a variable of interest means that only the factor that was changed could have had the effect. Clearly, manipulating multiple variables at a time is self-defeating, since you won’t be able to say which one caused the change in outcome. This principle is fantastically important in scientific discovery, so it is very constructive for students to learn to value it, but in fact it misses a key aspect – the most creative aspect – of ‘real’ scientific research: the selection of what to look for and what to alter to see its effect. I argue that students should begin their science education with the teacher pointing in the direction of the appropriate variables to choose, to develop the concept, but later on there has to be the freedom to choose their own and thus take research in directions they choose. This would be powerful in that students can begin to understand that the forefront of scientific research involves a fair amount of blundering in the dark. Moreover, research is often considered ‘good’ when it generates more questions on a topic after answering a couple. This generation of questions as a direct result of experimentation is almost entirely absent from the school science narrative.

These questions, which arise as a natural consequence of finding one thing out, help to direct the generation of scientific models. Scientific models are the bread and butter of school science, although many students and even teachers don’t really appreciate this. A timely example is the standard model of particle physics, which recently received dramatic further verification through the confirmation of the existence of a particle called the Higgs’ boson. And yet, the very idea of a particle is a model of reality – a description, accessible to anyone with the time and inclination to read about it, of how things are in (relatively!) day-to-day language. Every relevant experiment has found support for this model, which is why it is lauded as the greatest and most complete model of reality. Perhaps a more pertinent example for an article on school science would be the particle theory, of a different type. Readers may recall drawing little circles to represent the arrangement of particles (meant quite differently from the particles in the standard model!) in solids, liquids and gases during their time in school. This particle model of matter is fantastically useful for explaining phenomena such as melting, conduction of heat, convection, evaporation and so forth. However, the recognition that this is a model, a simplified conceptual framework to describe how the world actually is, often goes a begging. It could be argued that it is too difficult for young teens to understand that you can explain natural phenomena with a model that is not, very strictly speaking, ‘reality’. Yet models of thinking underpin any intellectual endeavour, not just science. There are models of geographical processes, of language and linguistics, of psychological processes and so on. Grasping that accepted paradigms are taught to you in school, but they are liable to shift with new evidence, seems to be a vital lesson on the way to the overarching goal of education as I see it: to learn to think for yourself.

The largest leaps in scientific progress happen when someone makes an observation that seems a little fishy given the accepted paradigm. A lovely example is Edwin Hubble’s observation of nebulae – these vast space clouds had been observed before, but were thought to be within the Milky Way. Hubble was suspicious of this accepted model of the universe, and was creative enough to go looking for evidence that contradicted the paradigm. Through observations of Cepheid variable stars and attendant brightness/apparent brightness calculations, he stimulated a paradigm shift to a picture we now take for granted: the universe is not limited to just our galaxy. Historical examples like this can be enlightening; however, as outlined above, scientific evidence tends to be presented as finished fact – a sort of end point. The reality is that it is built of fluid models, subject to change. This Hubble example is not taught within standard science curricula, which is a shame because it would appeal strongly to children’s irrepressible curiosity about things like the size of the universe. In fact, school science becomes very bogged down in the applications of science to ‘real life’ and everyday technology, at the expense of the big questions. There seems to have been a misguided sense that students will find science more interesting and relevant if it applies to their lives – thus students learn about how plastics are made and how electricity is generated. Nothing particularly wrong or even boring, in such subjects of study, but science has certainly tackled many more immediately interesting topics! There is no reason to avoid studying the size of the universe, the effects of purified laudanum on the body, necrotising fasciitis, how a blue whale can hold its breath for so long and other simply interesting things. These are interesting because they are spiritual, involve high risk, are gory or are extreme. You could say: the kinds of topics you’d see on a science TV show. This is a rub for some – the idea that the noble quest for truth represented by application of the scientific method would be dumbed down and reduced to pop science. However, that is to forget that long before career scientists even existed, progress was made by hobbyists with time and money on their hands, who were interested in how the world works. This intellectual curiosity has not gone away, it is still apparent in even the most disaffected teenagers, and is the route into teaching science as a huge project to make sense of the universe. Thus, not only does the emphasis of school science need to change as described earlier, the topics through which the scientific method can be taught also need an overhaul.

Finally, while developing an acute awareness that science is the greatest intellectual movement of all time, students should learn the limits to what science can find out. Ultimately, it is one method of interrogating the world around us for understanding, and can answer the vast majority of questions on how things work and why things happen. However, the insatiable human need for meaning is unsatisfied by answers in terms of the Big Bang, gravity and evolution on a planet in the Goldilock’s zone. Human beings will look elsewhere for emotional fulfilment – I’m not bitter about it – and science will not help them. Passing sensible judgement on what science can and can’t find out should be the final lesson learned by students in school, so they can decide for themselves on issues that attract and affect us all.