In an absorbing post on his blog, Brian Clegg muses on Ben Goldacre’s remark (at SciBlog08) that science journalists are all very well, but what we need are scientists who can more easily engage with the media. The comments thread is extremely insightful, and reading it, two comments jumped out.
One was from Austin Elliott, who suggested that what might help would be more academic positions concerned specifically with the public understanding of science. That would, in my view, be a waste of time. What we need are scientists who can communicate science, not make science communication into a field of study in itself. Again, in my view, the recent attempts to formalize this activity, in the UK at least, have had only limited success. It produces more ‘science communicators’ than the market can support, and I suspect that the public is no more engaged in science than it had been before PUS was created.
This is quite apart from the monstrous reinvention of characters such as the little-known geneticist He Who Must Not Be Named into a professor of PUS and thus a public spokesman for science, who is an excellent communicator of something that he imagines is science, but isn’t. But I digress.
The second comment came from Maxine, who wrote
- I think some of the older generation of scientists: Maddox, Medawar, Haldane, Maynard Smith, Freeman Dyson, Sagan eg al, obtained many of their basic skills via a “good all-round education”. Many of them were or are proficient in several languages, to boot. I suspect that in some countries at least, education is much narrower these days, which does not equip people with skills outside the actual practice of their discipline on which to build.
And here is where I think the problem lies.
Once upon a time, any child who was intelligent but of limited means (these were usually boys, but that was more a reflection of the times than anything else) could attend, at public expense, a grammar school in which they would receive that ‘good all-round education’, which would include such essentials as the classics, Latin and English grammar. Their ‘good all-round education’ would equip them with a wealth of allusion, and a well-toned capability in which they could express it, that could be turned to any field of enquiry, including science — infusing it with engaging vividness.
So what went wrong? The answer is the infection of the education system, at least in Britain, with socialist idealogues who felt that grammar schools pandered to an elite, and that segregation based on ability was a bad thing. These days, therefore, children of any ability are denied the tools they need for such things as effective science communication (and, incidentally, social mobility is lower than it has been for a generation or more).
The result has been the invention of such things as ‘science communication’ as a way of trying to make up for what a ‘good all-round education’ once supplied.
Too little. Too late.
It’s sad that we have to bemoan the dramatic decline in the teaching of science in the UK. But what saddens me more is the near-total extinction of the classics, Latin, Greek and the teaching of formal grammar.
I was lucky enough to have had some Latin in my youth. It helped me greatly to understand my own language. Classics, I learned at my mother’s knee. But I regard it as nothing less than a disability that I was never taught formal English grammar. It leaves me crying tears of frustration. And now, it makes me angry — angry at the educationalists who denied me my rights as a citizen, all in the cause, I think, of creating a more compliant society which, sundered from any hope of free and articulate expression, could be more easily manipulated. We read George Orwell and shudder at the social engineering of Newspeak. Well, friends, Newspeak is here. It’s all around us.
And faced with that, have we a hope in hell of communication the subtleties of evolution or climate change or the Higgs boson or anything else that isn’t some melon-chested lovely on page 3 or the lottery results or X-Factor?
No, we do not.
Anyone with a classical education would know immediately what I am going to say next. They would have read Juvenal’s Satire X in which he comments on a once-great and responsible society that now hopes in its decadence for just two things – panem et circenses (no, look it up) – handed out for free by the government in the hope that it would distract the populace from the tyranny and corruption of their government.
Perhaps we should emphasise more on SUP – Scientists Understanding of the Public – rather than PUS. There is always the danger that PUS initiatives start to look condescending.
However, there seems to be a lot of media interest in the start up of the LHC, which I hope means there is public interest too. However, the presenters on the Today programme on R4 today seemed to be rather confused; they referred to “Strangelet Goo” as a possible (unfortunate) outcome of the experiment. Methinks that the good old nanoscare has required all bad outcomes of science to result in a goo.
On the whole, I agree with your argument – but I was struck by the fact that you seemed to be implying that only grammar schools supplied a “good all-round education”.
Perhaps it was a reflection of the time (1960s) and a quirk of the location (the Isle of Man), but I attended a comprehensive where I was taught not only English grammar, but Latin before focusing on science in my final years. So I would consider that I had the benefit of a good all-round education, without the need to attend a grammar school.
It might have been a quirk of the time and the location, but there have been some comps that kept a kind of grammar-school ethos, perhaps at a time when teachers were still of the old-school and had had a ‘good old-fashioned education’ themselves.
I think the point was that grammar schools were available to anyone who could demonstrate ability, irrepsective of their ability to pay for it. The removal of that principle — that ability must be nurtured — cannot but have had an effect on the slide of the UK on all measures of educational achievement and scientific impact over the past 50 years. Anyone remember the ‘White Heat of Technology’ promised by Labour in the 1960s? Bah.
Of course you know this is not a strictly U.K. problem.
I only wanted to utter my support of a “good all-round education” at any level – including up to and including university level, in what in the U.S. is known as a “liberal arts” education, which has personally served me very well. I only was able to benefit from it, though, because I went to a public school system that was unafraid at the time to encourage its more gifted elements while not forgetting to provide a good all-round education to those with more difficulties. At the time, people worried about the middle being left out, but I think other school systems could do worse than to take certain imperfect Massachusetts schools as models.
As you say, Henry, it really depends on what the state is trying to accomplish. The tabloidism of England in the last 15 years, though, is quite striking. If that was involuntary, then there must have been a number of things wrong with educational politics in the meantime.
Sorry about the “eg” (instead of “et”) in my comment which you cite above. Pah, no education, these 151-year-olds, you see!
I started out at a Montessori school, and then was rudely transplanted, like an uprooted bean seedling, into the public (US definition) school system when my family moved to Texas. I resent the sudden loss of finger-painting, knitted balls, felt beanbags, and weird Mexican gourds to this day. Many of the public schools are pretty supportive of music and theater education, but most neglect the visual arts, which I think is a great shame.
I attended what’s known as a “magnet high school”, in my case one for the health professions, part of the public school system in Houston. In retrospect, I think the benefits of attending such a school outweighed the negative aspects. I struggled a bit to catch up with basics (calculus, physics, analytical chemistry) my first year of university, because the instruction in those areas had been rather poor at the magnet school. However, I learned basic nursing and med tech skills, so I had good summer and weekend jobs as a medical office assistant and nurse aide throughout my undergraduate years. I learned how to do blood smears, basic hematological analyses, tissue processing, and sectioning of paraffin-embedded tissues: all of which were useful in graduate school and postdoctoral research. In the guise of medical terminology, I learned Latin and Greek word roots, and I still use that knowledge (and inflict it upon the medical and dental students).
Most importantly, I was exposed to socioeconomically and ethnically diverse groups of individuals, as classmates, teachers, healthcare workers, and patients, and I learned from all of them. I worked on the pediatric ward of the charity hospital in a large city, and I encountered and absorbed a lot that shaped my attitudes and behavior. Otherwise, there was very little in my subsequent education that would have prevented me from developing into an insufferable elitist snot, just like many of the people I encountered in university, graduate school, and postdoctoral training.
Just spotted my name…!
Actually I agree with you, Henry – I definitely wasn’t suggesting posts in the “academic study of science communication” – I was specifically suggesting giving scientists who were good at communicating science roles whose point was actually to communicate. At present such jobs don’t exist.
Or almost not… Whatever you may think of your Nemesis/Bete Noire He Who Must Not Be Named, he does actually communicate. That is the kind of job there should be in “Science Communication” – NOT people to write scholarly books about “social structures whereby scientists communicate” which will be read by a few dozen academics in the sociology of science.
Another thing I would quite like to see is a “rebuttal” unit to combat high-profile scientific drivel in the media. I have suggested to those members of the scientific Great and Good that I occasionally encounter that (say) the Royal Society ought to have a “scientific rapid rebuttal” unit. The point would be that when something like MMR hits the press, they could ring the journalists up (or be a place journalists could call up) and tell them exactly why it was all a crock of XXXX. At present it takes so long to generate any kind of considered response that it is shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted.