On giving up science at age fifteen ... (Debate)

Thu 23 Nov 2023, 19:20

I had to make similar choices - good at languages and at science/maths, forced to choose (science/maths) at 15, and I regret it and have done my best to make it up later.  And it's easier to catch up with the humanities after studying science than the other way round.     However, there are several arguments in favour of learning second languages apart from missing all that history and culture, and it's this: there's a great deal of respectable research from all over the world showing that for people who grow up with two languages, when you correct for all extrinsic variables, if they're going to get dementia in old age they get it about five years later than the comparable sample.   

Thu 23 Nov 2023, 18:04

Sweden: I took science, but had to study history, geography and religion to age 17, and 3 foreign languages to age 18. Obviously this was on top of Chemistry, Physics and Maths. This was a good base for my MSc at uni. 

This is to demonstrate that the britishers specialise way to early. I know it's a known fact, here is just how it's done in other countries. 

Thu 23 Nov 2023, 15:55 (last edited on Fri 24 Nov 2023, 07:26)

No 15-year old should give up on science (and I wish I had done more science), but nor should they the arts and humanities. The 3 A-level curriculum is dangerously narrow - how about keeping history, at least one foreign language, as well as a science and an art subject until at least 16, developing holistic, grounded young people with broad interests who understand their own cultures (including the classics) and those of others. As becomes increasingly clear, technology is nothing without a sound understanding of the arts and humanities. 

Thu 23 Nov 2023, 14:54 (last edited on Thu 23 Nov 2023, 14:55)

For my first degree I had to choose between Physics and Medieval Literature. I chose the latter because my professor was a hottie. Pulchritudo fades. Physica manet in aeternum.

I wish I'd chosen differently now. :)

Wed 22 Nov 2023, 18:29

Hans, my education was such that, at the age of around twelve, I had to stop studying Geography because Ancient Greek was deemed to be more worthwhile. As to whether if would be useful on the dinnerparty circuit, I bow to your superior knowledge! 

Wed 22 Nov 2023, 13:29

I think the britishers are mad when studying history, English, art, philosophy and such like. Obviously one should study STEM. Because increasingly everything is technology. Studying the classics is useful on the dinnerparty circuit but pretty useless when managing a pandemic. QED. (Yes we engineers also know some Latin. We can also appreciate art, languages and literature.)

Wed 22 Nov 2023, 02:19

Yes Valerie.

Spot on!

Tue 21 Nov 2023, 23:35

It's worth looking up the Rice (or Wheat) Chess Riddle (or Puzzle, or folk-tale).   It concerns an Emperor, usually Chinese, who determined to reward a loyal subject with whatever the subject asked.  The subject asked for a chess board (they have 64 squares, of course) and said that all he asked was for one grain on the first square, two (ie double) on the second, four (double again) on the third.  Of course the Emperor agreed, and of course by the half-way point they'd reached more grain than in the whole of the kingdom, and by the 64th .... 

For what it's worth: once or twice I've taught statistics to people whose self-talk is that they don't understand numbers, and in order to domesticate some of the concepts I tried to make them memorable.  'Rate of growth = state of growth' is a neat way of getting people to remember exponential functions.  Remembering doesn't necessarily mean understanding, but it's a start.  

Tue 21 Nov 2023, 19:14

Two Cultures in action re the Covid Enquiry: "Back in the Covid inquiry, Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England and chief medical adviser for the government, said that one problem he had in early 2020 was getting ministers to understand how quickly Covid could spread. He said:

I think that one of the things that we really did not find easy to get across – and I found this surprising given that so many people in both politics and in the official system are trained in economics – is the extraordinary power of exponential growth to get you from small numbers to large numbers very quickly.

People just don’t get that … I think they got it a bit more now because of having seen it. But certainly prior to this pandemic, I think people just didn’t understand how quickly you move from ‘it’s actually very small numbers to it’s actually very large numbers and doubling every few days’."

Tue 21 Nov 2023, 19:10 (last edited on Tue 21 Nov 2023, 19:35)

Hannen,

Momenti sapientiae oblivisci senectutis. 

Tue 21 Nov 2023, 18:57

Christine, Valerie, and Alice, I agree.

I studied Latin (and other subjects) to what was then called "O" level.  A clean sweep of 9, then 3 "A" star levels.  I'm currently studying for a fourth "A" level.  Distance learning, paid for by HM Government.  Not for vanity, or money, but to help people.

It was the "UT" clause which brought me down.   Lol.

Durius nunc invenio. Estne aetas mea?

Tue 21 Nov 2023, 14:58

C. P. Snow has been accused of a lot of things. But I don't think excusing ignorance was ever part of his agenda. 

Snow had started out as a molecular biologist, gaining his PhD at Cambridge in 1930, and worked in that field for around 20 years. With the outbreak…

Long post - click to read full text

Tue 21 Nov 2023, 10:28

I think CP Snow might have been making excuses ....   Surely these folk remember their Flanders & Swann?

"Heat won't pass from a cooler to a hotter.   You can try it if you like but you far better notter.   'Cause the cold in the cooler will be hotter as a ruler.  Because the hotter body's heat will pass through the cooler".  "That's entropy man!"

I think there is a snobbishness against the sciences.  A bit like a Victorian landed person looking down on the industrialists?  By the age of 15 in a girls grammar school we had been taught, but maybe not learnt, a Shakespeare play and the Laws of Thermodynamics.   That was necessary to make a choice about what to do next.

Tue 21 Nov 2023, 00:40 (last edited on Tue 21 Nov 2023, 00:42)

There is some chatter about the failure of the governing classes to square up to basic tenets of science and mathematics, so may I offer a quotation?  CP Snow - who coined the phrase Corridors of Power, but doesn't figure much nowadays - gave a lecture and wrote a book called The Two Cultures, lamenting what he saw as the deficit in the basic mental furniture that should ensure a workaday familiarity with, and lack of fear of, what we would now call STEM subjects. 

Here's the most striking paragraph, should anyone need it:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

Hope that's useful for some.