I heard on Radio 4 earlier this week, various educationlists whining on about the new science examination called “Science for Living” or something similar. Science for a dumbed down generation! It will widen elitism since it is generally kids from the state school sector who are going to be taught it! Leaving the real science involving chemicals, expensive glassware and experiments involving mysterious dial-ridden boxes to the posh kids! The world will end! Britain needs more scientists, not less! And so the hyperbolic whine went on.
Now, I love cooking. I’m not great at it, and I don’t do it as much as I would choose. I don’t have the time or inclination. But I do have a natural kind of flair. I can usually second guess what ingredients work with others without needing a recipe book. My kitchen time management is pretty good and unlike most areas involving multiple activities that can lead to a daggersdukc panicfaff, the kitchen environment is somehow soothing. I am to the kitchen what my mum is to gardening. Seemingly with no effort at all, plants of all shapes and sizes flourish under her supervision – plants from spuds to exotic trees thrive under her Midas touch. It’s a wonderful thing, but she’s trained as a nurse, not a gardener or landscaper.
I started cooking at school. Our teacher, Mrs Johnson, was a strict taskmistress, and taught us well the fundamentals. But, seeing as this was ILEA in the 1980s there was never the opportunity posited in my direction to train more formally, for example, as a chef. And besides, it would never have crossed my mind to train further.
The new science curriculum focuses on areas of life which most inquisitive kids already have a basic knowledge or at least interest in GM foods, the changing environment, mobile phones and so on. If the facts behind these are used to illustrate the real dope strands of science – radio waves, chemistry, physics, meteorology to name but a few, then what it might achieve, far more than any dry and to a kid’s mind, irrelevant, experiments with Bunsen burners and pickled dogs*, is make the brain’s lightbulb go ‘ping’. I would love to do a course like this; I mean how damn fascinating. Real issues, real products, real science. Being a schoolboy would be so much fun doing courses like this.
I never took up cooking. BUT…what I obtained from the loudest Brummie in London, also known as Linda Johnson, was the confidence to make my own way around the kitchen, not be afraid of kitchen disasters (as with Sinatra’s regrets, there have been a few, but then again…). And many of the kids doing Science for Living won’t be interested in later years, in thermodynamics. Who cares? Science is an elite subject like maths or the Classics. That’s why it pays so well once you get past a certain level. Top scientists would be the first to moan should their professions become comodified like production line workers. And most kids who are forced into doing old-fashioned science won’t ever use these skills. Heck, I don’t use anything I learned while doing my degree, but I’m very glad I did it.
School, today, isn’t an education in the sense that it was 50 or even 20 years ago, but a springboard towards greater things. Look, 50 percent of kids now go on to higher ed and you need a degree to clean a Micky D’s floor. So if you’re going to get sprung towards a scientific vocation, it makes far more sense to go into real sciences – the hard slog - understanding complex theorems, mathematics, hypothesis, experimentation, more experimentation, review, conclusion – having some sense of the ends to which it can be used.
I bet you after a few years, universities will be complaining about the poor quality of undergrads. I also bet their will be many, many more of them. That’s when the real hard education begins – the way it should be.
Who’s first in the queue then?
* I only mention this poor beast as our school had a dog feotus suspended in alcohol in what Americans would call a Mason jar. No one ever took the lid off while I was there.
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