Lots of handwringing going on today about the state of science education and in particular how to encourage more young people to keep studying the subjects to A level and beyond.

Emma Brockes in today's Guardian says at one point that "Science lessons have always been thought of as boring, but what seems to have changed is adolescent tolerance of it." I'm not so sure - at least as a viewer of the most recent Channel 4 "That'll Teach 'em" series where they took a class of current GCSE students back in time by thirty or forty years to give them a flavour of a 60s/70s grammar school education.

What came over there was that science lessons have become boring. Gone are the days of loud bangs, noxious smells and pulling things apart, of distilling alcohol and teasing out amorphous sulphur chains. Although I was good, even if I do say so myself (A grades at O level in Physics, Chemistry and Maths - Biology even then was seen as an also ran science because you didn't need it to get onto any serious "discovery" type university courses like medicine or biochemistry), I reckon I remember more of my own O level courses than those kids appear ever to be taught nowadays for the mushed up GCSE "Science" course. And, when faced with the "real science" of cutting things up and making smells and flash-bangs and playing with electron beams and van der Graaf generators and so on, the kids on that program really warmed to it.

Is it all a health and safety thing? Certainly some of what we did at O level (chemistry in particular) could have been dangerous - and in our school Pyrotechnics Club we would create things that today would now only be found on "extremist" websites and would get you four years at GTMO for knowing. Or perhaps squeamishness - the kids on the program had clearly never dissected anything before and once they got over the first few seemed to really enjoy it - even the vegetarians. Or is it just money? Safety aside, sciences should overall be cheaper nowadays I would have thought. There is much more you can do with cheap computers before you get into the lab situation.

My young niece got a "chemistry set" for Christmas last year. I was pleased to hear it. But when I saw it, it was no chemistry set of the sort I remember. Nothing to burn or anything like that. Just some collection, it seemed, of things that make different coloured and shaped crystals if you leave them for a few days.

Science is about discovery, often exciting discovery. And discovery requires risk. If all the risk is taken out of the classroom they're not going to discover anything and not going to get the "science bug". I wish now I had kept my head and insisted on doing Physics and Maths at A level. They are the hardest things to get back into at a higher level - you can always read up on history, law and so on later if you want to, but with maths and sciences beyond a certain level somehow it's much more difficult.

Let ten years olds make bangs, smells and laser guns, let them poke around in the guts of rats or frogs and we'll soon have people wanting to do sciences I'm sure.

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