Sir, – The welcome Irish TimesEditorial "Celebrating science" (January 13th) wonders why science is more or less absent from Irish culture after we have spent more than a billion euro bringing Irish research to the fore internationally.
The Government policy on science and engineering, managed mostly by the IDA and Science Foundation Ireland, has been a great success and we can see this as our knowledge-based industries and services lead our economic recovery.
In research, an important measure of scientific infrastructure, Trinity mathematics has been ranked top in the world by citations per paper. Irish genetics has recently been ranked by citations as first in Europe and far ahead of the US and Japan. Several other sciences are also highly placed.
In spite of these important successes, for most of us (and the Government), science means little more than jobs.
In a deeper sense we are a scientifically illiterate people and when you are in that position you may not even know it. Science should be an ordinary part of our daily lives, in the same way as art and literature and music or any of the other threads that make up the warp and weft of civilisation.
The Government can quickly do a few things in education and communication to encourage a more profound appreciation of science. It must radically change the curriculum in science and mathematics, placing greater emphasis on the “hard” sciences, mathematics, physics and chemistry, which are best suited to the education of a “scientific” mind. The universities will need to co-operate and set higher standards in these subjects for entry to medicine, science, engineering, etc. Teachers of these subjects will need to be properly qualified – many are not – and the unions will need to accept that they should be paid above the standard rates. Biology is important but it is hard to avoid giving too much value to memorisation.
There may be a radical way forward. Leaving Certificate biology could be replaced by a new subject, “Evolution”. The focus of the course would be to investigate and demonstrate the theory of evolution, the fundamental theory of biology, with lots of nature study, population biology, data collection, statistics, computation, genetics and biochemistry. The challenge is to produce a course which deserves to be classified as a “hard” science.
Many students avoid the hard sciences altogether, usually because they are weak (or think they are) at mathematics. This means that they leave school with little understanding of science or, more importantly, of the scientific method. I suggest a new and compulsory Leaving Certificate course on “The History of Ideas”, which would introduce all students to the great intellectual and practical developments of the last 3,000 years.
These would include the scientific method and the main theories of the different sciences from maths to neuroscience. Memorisation would not be enough if this course were well designed, and it would be a good way to bolster history and English. It should direct RTÉ to invest heavily in science on radio (which is not expensive),including Radio 2 and Lyric FM.
The President has asked us all to engage in thinking about a new Ireland and I hope he will choose “The place of science” as one of the themes. One of our main tasks is to build a society that is as literate in science as it is in the humanities, to bridge the divide between them, and to raise the appreciation of both to completely new levels.
Let us be clear: we need to re-organise the way in which our children are educated, at home, at school and in every waking moment. (I learned a lot of science in the Scouts!). The goal is a society where contented and confident people have a rational understanding of the natural world around them and of their place and responsibilities as part of this world.
With science in their minds they will be better able to distinguish the supernatural from the natural, dogma from reason, authority from authoritarianism, and bad science from good science; to enjoy and wonder at the beauty and complexity of our world; to understand challenges to the economy, to health and the environment; to participate in logical discussions about technical issues in law, banking, insurance, medical care, waste management, transport systems, energy supplies; and to make crucial personal decisions, especially in medical care.
A citizen without science in the 21st century will come to resemble a citizen without literacy in the 20th – impoverished in mind and body, unemployable, discontented and disruptive. – Yours, etc,