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Education: Science and Technology

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, for raising this important question and drawing to your Lordships’ attention the issues that I think will be increasingly crucial. I speak as someone interested in education, not as a scientist. Therefore, I shall be brief. Thinking of education in secondary schools, particularly as it is now, everyone would agree that there is an increasing need for improving the scientific understanding of pupils in school, especially of those who are of high intelligence and high ambition and are likely to be future leaders, including academic leaders and leaders in the media, but who do not intend to be professional scientists. New methods of teaching and learning—of which the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, spoke with such knowledge and imagination—must go hand in hand with new educational content. Many of the people to whom I have already referred in the category of highly intelligent and potentially influential people—and everyone at school—needs a broad familiarity with the development and the history of science and the basic concepts on which the sciences are founded and were founded in the past. I emphasise the continuity and development of science, because it is easy to teach science in a fashion that makes people think, ““This is what the facts are, and I can prove them by experimenting in a laboratory; no one has ever thought anything different, and no one ever will think anything different in the future””. An understanding of the basic concepts has perhaps been most nearly achieved in the biological sciences, but such knowledge and understanding are badly lacking in physics, chemistry and engineering. I know that there is a new set of syllabuses for GCSE and A-level—I shall come back to those in a moment—but an entirely new sort of syllabus based far less on teaching in the laboratory and far more on distance and interactive learning should be devised. That would be the kind of flexible classroom that was envisaged by the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield. The notion of a flexible classroom is of enormous importance for the kind of subject matter with which I am concerned. As I have said, some attempts to open up scientific subjects to more pupils than those who are likely to be specialists are already being made, but, as far as I understand it—I have looked into the syllabuses to a certain extent—the usual methods of making science more accessible tend to move straight into ethical questions, because it is supposed that that is likely to make them more user-friendly. Far too much of bio-ethics, for instance, is based on an insecure conceptual foundation. The issues raised by the noble Baroness’s Question are therefore of the greatest importance. The new, flexible classroom as she conceives it should be able to open up to the non-scientific world the imaginative possibilities of the scientific world. It would be for people who do not want to spend their time on the minutiae or who do not want to spend half their university career in the laboratory. I was never more sympathetic with any group of people in my time in Cambridge than with the engineering students, who really had no time at all for a social life because the burden of their experimental work was so intense. There are numbers of people, including me, who never could be a scientist because they are far too impatient and far too easily bored—that is why I felt so sorry for the engineers in Cambridge. However, I believe that a large number of people could be introduced to the concepts of science and learn to be critical through the internet and the interchange and organisation of information. Large numbers of people could be helped to gain an understanding, which would make a great difference to our society in the sense that it would make dialogue between scientists and the lay far more possible. It would perhaps begin to remove to a certain extent that lack of trust in scientists which so often characterises people’s declarations of belief about scientific results and the kind of articles that one all too often sees in the media which inevitably show the scientist as someone who is alien and cannot be trusted not to have the most horrible designs on our society. For all those reasons, the kind of flexibility that the noble Baroness advocated is of great importance, but it should immediately reflect in the content of what is taught in secondary schools to people who are non-scientists.