Stand up for science

Teaching Curiosity

Schools normalising after 680 days of Covid disruptions are an opportunity to reflect on this era — it’s now too long to be called an event. Science enabled vaccines that made successive virus mutations less deadly. Technology made this era bearable; streaming, e-commerce, online classes, video calls, digital newspapers, webinars, and much else. Obviously separating science and technology so neatly is like separating milk and sugar once mixed. But while India’s technology capabilities are enviable, our long-run innovativeness, prosperity and inclusiveness need reimagining our school science education.

India’s scientific challenges are a wicked problem; difficult to explain and monumental to fix. The last two decades have quadrupled scientific research publishing from India. But outside software and digital technology, our brain drain continues; global labs, hospitals, and PhD programmes are filled with Indian names. Some of this may reflect resources; 80% of R&D spending in India is by the government, compared with 75% private sector spending in most western countries. We need to create new cycles; basic research platforms need to exist in a focussed way, long before conversion to usable technology. We also need to respect cognitive diversity; the vaccine project in the UK was led by Kate Bingham, a biochemist by training, but a successful biotechnology investor who knew how to evaluate technology and drive projects.

Government, industry and academia need to work together to create leadership in the various sciences — Human/Biological, Earth and Environmental, Energy, Materials/Chemicals, Digital, Space/Defence, Physical, etc. India is most active in digital, somewhat active in agriculture, environment and climate change, less active in space/defence research and least active in human/medical research. Building a deeper research ecosystem needs more porous barriers between practitioners and academics.

Students today rarely rank scientific research at the top of their dream career list but Moderna, Tesla, iPhones, or SpaceX are impossible without science research and education. School science education is challenging; Harvard economist Claudia Goldin suggests that some of the income gender differences are explained by greedy jobs; professions that destroy your life’s balance but pay you well. I suggest Science is viewed by students as a ‘greedy subject’, needing a lot of input without any visible impact or upside. This needs reimagining science education in school in three ways: pedagogy, assessment and faculty.

Pedagogy: Studying science in India demands mastering a vast body of content over many years, with little experimentation. The innate curiosity that children have for how their world functions is blunted with this barrier to exploration and wonder. The NEP mentions scientific temper, scientific thinking and the scientific method. The Atal Innovation Mission provides some ground for bringing in experimentation and industry collaboration for schools, and is a step in the right direction that needs to accelerate. Laboratory work must move from optional to essential, and beyond demonstrations or simulation. The celebration of science needs to parallel the celebration of sports.

Assessment: Scientific thinking involves identifying problems, hypothesis testing, determining variables, collating and evaluating data at every stage of learning. None of these is about our current assessment system’s demands of one right answer. A temperature curve is rarely perfect in an experiment, but instead of questioning it, students copy the textbook curve. The way we teach science is about memorisation of content, leading to high grades. And then society recognises that the highest graded students pursue sciences, yet another caste system. Current science teachers demand one right answer because our assessment system has no room for learning from failure. This must change.

Faculty: Pedagogy is important but not enough. My innate love for science comes from my Biochemistry and Biotechnology bachelor and masters, where full-time faculty was complemented by practitioners and visits -- Genetic Engineering from BARC, Immunology from a Cancer Research Institute Oncologist, Biochemistry by an industry specialist. They brought alive manipulating bacteriophage, RTPCR, and the elegance of the insulin molecule. This crossover of faculty and practitioners needs to be brought to schools. Yet another challenge is that schools assume science teachers to not be capable of ‘pastoral care’, which is often relegated to the humanities or English teachers. How can a teacher be a good teacher without being able to understand students?

We need to change science teaching to scientific thinking by reimagining the answers to basic questions: Why do students study science? What do we want to teach in science? How should we teach science? Who is a good science teacher? How should we assess sciences? Polio vaccine inventor Jonas Salk wrote, “Science in all its different disciplines, theoretical and experimental, has contributed to solving the problems which have given birth to new ones with which we are now confronted”. India has solved our problem of engineering education; few economists would have predicted that a poor country would have five million people writing software. But the wage premiums of software have created new problems for professions that depend on scientists. This problem can only be solved by expanding the quantity and quality of school science education.

On his 84th birthday, Thomas Lindahl recently revealed that “at school, I had a teacher that didn’t like me and I didn’t like him. At the end of the year, he decided to fail me. I have the distinction of being the only Nobel Laureate in Chemistry who failed Chemistry in High School.” Most students won’t get Nobel Prizes or fail their chemistry exam, but our science teaching currently fails them before their exams. Time for educators to stand up for science.

(The writer is Head of School, Neev Academy)