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

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 of World War II, he became a scientific adviser to the British government, including as technical director of the Ministry of Labour from 1940 to 1944, and as a civil service commissioner from 1945 to 1960. During his time as a politician Snow was parliamentary secretary in the House of Lords to the Minister of Technology from 1964 to 1966 in the Labour government of Harold Wilson.

By the 1950s Snow was much better known as a novelist than as a scientist when he put forward the "two cultures" hypothesis in 1959. The literary critic F R Leavis roundly attacked and satirised his position in the 1960s: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/16/leavis-snow-two-cultures-bust

To quote from one of the comments on the Guardian article: " In the simplest and most concrete way, Snow judged that the ruling classes of the USA and Germany were better educated than those of Britain because British higher education (for A level GCE and at universities) required specialization in either arts or sciences, abandoning the other. Snow thought the breadth of curriculum usual in the USA and on the Continent prepared the ruling class better to deal with future technological problems, possibly all types of problem.".

I was a great admirer of Leavis as a literary critic; but thought (and continue to think) that Snow was right on this -- and that Leavis was, as the Guardian article also explains, grossly unfair. I used to hate Leavis's guest lectures at the University of York in the mid-1960s when he obsessively returned back to attacking Snow. 

It would be interesting to know what was the proportion of scientists and statisticians who entered the civil servants during Snow's time as an advisor on civil service recruitment. I suspect it was probably more than the 10% reported by Patrick Vallance to be the proportion entering the civil service via the Fast Track in the years immediately before the Covid pandemic. 

I suspect that I am considerably older than Alice. I was not lucky enough to have been taught anything about thermodynamics at my girl's grammar school in the 1950s/1960s, although I certainly did learn a lot about Shakespeare (thank goodness). Choosing what to do next in life was also very restricted for girls at that time. For example, one needed Latin in order to enter Oxford or Cambridge -- something that I (like many other girls) did not have.