Anger Has No Place in an Objective Media - Discuss



Write on only one side of the paper and do not use any facts.

The title and juvenile sub-title are an attempt to recognise the irony of discussing the following in what can only ever be a place for my prejudices.

Please read this article first.

Finished? Good! Hold on while I read it as well.

The thrust of this is that the new science curriculum for GCSE seems to have had the science removed in favour of airy-fairy discussion off science-related topics in the media. The class in the Radio 4 article this morning were discussing recent stories that have again raised the view that the moon landings were faked. A third of the pupils in the class believed that. I am afraid that it is only now that I have realised that most state school pupils have not actually been studying separate courses for Chemistry, Physics and Biology at GCSE for some time; this separation being confined largely to grammar and independent schools. The new curriculum which has just started this year removes the study even further from core scientific discipline and appears to turn the whole thing into a giant discussion along the lines of “what do you believe about science?” based on current obsessions in the media. This suggests that the teaching of science will not be much above the filler articles you find in the centre pages of The Daily Mail, such as predicting the future based on hidden codes within The Bible, or stuff about people with past-lives. My first O-Level Physics class began with the pure facts of density – in fact when I went back to the school years later, I dropped in on my physics teacher (my favourite teacher of all time) and she was happily doing that very lesson – quite took my breath away at how little time had actually passed. We were often asked for opinions on the possible outcome of experiments or how you might use maths to analyse the results but subjective discussions were found only in humanities. It seems that social science has taken over everything these days. We are of course crying out for more social scientists aren’t we? All this lack of objectivity seems to have filtered through to business life with so much breath-taking stupidity in the application of processes to work-life.

I suppose all this nostalgia for school science has been sparked by the fact that the kitchen at this place has the same smell as the ready room between the Chemistry and Physics labs. I’m not sure that this smell is a very good idea in a kitchen because at school it was the result of leakage from specimen jars mixed up with the dust from the stone cutting machine. This was the very room where the physics teacher (not the same one as above) tried to disprove my claim that dowsing actually worked. The TV program that started me on this claimed (I think it was a serious one) that dowsing worked and I believed it. I don’t think his disproof worked but I’m pretty certain that my dowsing was all at best wishful thinking and at worst pure fakery.

And dad – I bent those forks myself.