Madam, - The annual post-Leaving Certificate hand-wringing is now under way regarding poor results and general lack of interest in science and mathematics. Many theories will be offered to explain this, followed by the announcement of complicated and usually very expensive plans to correct the problem.
However, unless and until we build user-friendly, hands-on, science centres to attract and engage children from their earliest years, then all such plans will fail.
That said, there have been a number of attempts to create such centres in Ireland.
One of the first was proposed as far back as 1994 for the old Pigeon House station in Ringsend. Unfortunately this did not materialise and neither did proposals for Stack A in the IFSC or for the old fruit market site in Dublin's city centre.
In the early 1990s, while working on the Pigeon House project, I discovered that India already had many such centres where children (and their parents) could play with and learn from simple experiments in maths, physics, chemistry and biology.
I have no doubt that this kind of hands-on approach helped and continues to help India to be a world player in technology and science.
It is just too late to try to "interest" students in science and mathematics when they reach second-level education. So, for once, let us do the simple thing and build the pyramid from the wide end up. Let us get children interested in science and mathematics by providing centres such as I have described above. - Yours, etc,
HENRY HUDSON, Raheny, Dublin.