By Adjunct Professor Kimberley Jong, Un-Australian Academy of Science.
My son HATES Science in School. He loathes and detests his teacher. He describes her as dull beyond reason, sub-human, bereft of humour, depleted of fun, niggardly, simplistic, whining, and bullying.
This is a sad but paradoxically telling reminder of the status of Science in schools. Science has been rendered thus. It’s a reflection of “US”.
I’m surprised Robin Williams still fronts the ‘Science Show’. Tony Abbott wasn’t joking when he said ‘Climate Science was Crap!!’. The entire front bench thinks that Science is crap. They don’t need Science, they’ve got certainty in God!!
Is this true for the rest of us?
Have we so depleted ourselves with an absence of imagination, we allow quite funky scientific apparatus like the synchrotron to become mothballed, whilst we mothball the imagination of several generations and turn their enthusiasm and passions in to Real Estate and Reality Television?
Surely it can’t be this bad?
It’s not always been this way. When Robert Holmes wrote the ‘Age of Wonder’, (2009 Royal Society prize for Science Books) and described that synthesis between Art and Science in the Eighteenth century he captured a society anointed by the Enlightenment to inspire themselves with limitless spiritual and intellectual potential. Joseph Banks, Isaac Newton, Hershel, and Joshua Reynolds got the ball rolling, and encouraged by the Aristocracy, Royalty and Business established great Science with great thinking.
Copernicus awaits the invention of the Spirograph
Once lit the spark was limitless. Limited only by ourselves. As a kiddy in the Space Race I was inspired by Science Fiction and our inexhaustible human potential. What has since stilled this I asked?
I asked the mutinous student, “Hey man what gives?”, and he summed it up. ‘I dig Science Fiction Man, I adore ‘Doctor Who, Bladerunner, Stephen Hawking’, (one of these three is not fiction) but we don’t get to use the Bunsen Burner, nor Magnesium, Phosphorus, Calcium like you used to in the olden days. It’s too dangerous, and wont get past Occupational Health and Safety. And we don’t indulge in the crossover between pure Science and Physics, you know. Like Rockets, Telescopes, Quantum Computers, Atomic Particle Science and the Super Hadron Collider. It’s like the teacher can’t weave the Science into a compelling riveting human story’.
“Jeez’, I said!
He continued expostulating; ‘Perhaps that’s why God, in spite of all the atrocities of kiddy fiddling Priests is on the rise again’ I scratched my head, he continued, ‘Yup, It gets to the stage that some crappy bullshit narrative dished up by a mad hermit in the second century B.C, beats Black Holes’. He paused before delivering the coup de grace, ‘That’s all there is really. Age of Enlightenment, Reason, Science. Game over!’
‘Fuck.’ I exclaimed. ‘It can’t be true!’
Tomorrow we publish the second incendiary instalment of Prof Jong’s report
BONUS! we end with a bored artist’s impression of bored students
Bored Artist’s impression of Bored Students