Science? Pah!!

This week, one of the offspring comes home with the classical IQ test question: “What was the largest island in the world before the discovery of Australia?”

The answer the expected is, of course, ‘Australia’ or if you want to get really technical about it,  ‘Australia but it didn’t have a name before its discovery as the Walpirri language of the people living there at the time had only 1000 words and they didn’t bother wasting them on something as simple as their country because they didn’t know that that’s what it was’.

But even the more complex answer is wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong!

To a geographer, the answer depends entirely on the time period you define; the real answer being:  ‘Australia for the 1.64 billion years preceding Cook’s landing; before that, who knows?’

To a true Physicist, the answer is, you’ve got to look at this from the perspective of quantum mechanics.  It’s like Schroedinger’s cat.  You can’t know for certain that Australia is going to turn out bigger than everything else until after you’ve discovered and measured it.  Before that, it’s just a probability wave-function.  At best, you can answer, ‘Probably Australia’.

You see, this is just a terribly imprecise question and it’s encouraging our kids to produce a terribly dumbed down answer, I rage.  It’s symptomatic of the fact that educators teach simplifications that amount to lies rather than the real truth, and why isn’t the science syllabus set by real scientists instead of politicians and educational specialists who don’t know a damned thing about science?   Now my ire is raised.

I blame Michael Gove.   My kids were taught that the Earth rotates around the Sun, and all other internally consistent answers using other reference frames were wrong.  And it’s his fault!  It’s not surprising the teachers are all on strike if this is the nonsense they’re asked to teach.  My God, you’d think Einstein had never lived!

OK, I admit, Mr Syllabus-Setter and Mr Gove, that it would be easier to teach that boys are made of slugs and snails and puppy dog tails, because at least that rhymes and kids could regurgitate it for exams, but that doesn’t make it a useful summary of biology .  Why don’t you teach them that the Earth is flat while you’re at it, because that makes the maths much easier?

“All that doesn’t fit in the answer box,” says my offspring, looking bemused at Daddy’s tantrum.

My wife, sitting in the corner, shrugs her shoulders.  “Pedant,” she says.