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Public PeFinding a balance between science and humanities

Posted on: Tuesday, 20 April 2004, 06:00 CDT

The Task Force on the Physical Sciences was set up by the Government in November 2000 to address a serious issue: the fall- off of interest in science as a subject to study and as a career choice.

This fall-off was all the more significant since it coincided with a growing awareness that our economic future would depend critically on our becoming a cradle of innovation in industries that are firmly science-based, in particular the information and computing sectors and biotechnology.

To do this, we will need a growing number of our brightest young people to be educated in scientific subjects, becoming dedicated to research in these areas, and attracted to a career that is related to science or engineering. So at the time when demand for science- driven young people was growing, the supply of such people was beginning to dry up.

The task force devised a programme of action to address this deficit.

The principal area was increasing the capacity of our education system to deliver effective and interesting teaching in science- related subjects at all levels. The programme addresses deficiencies in the availability of qualified teachers and of properly-equipped facilities for them to teach with and the lab assistance they require to implement an exciting practical expression of the science curriculum, allied to an information campaign making science subjects a more popular choice at school and university level.

It is a concern to us all that, two years after its publication, the action programme of the task force remains largely unimplemented. The longer this problem is allowed to fester, the more serious it will become - and the more difficult and expensive it will be to address it with any real prospect of success. And to the extent that we fail to succeed in this, our competitive advantage as a nation will be undermined. However, it is equally important to see these specific proposals as part of a much wider task - something far wider than any tweaking of the education system. This wider task involves the creation in Ireland of a truly balanced culture, one that straddles equally the world of the humanities and sciences. Only such a balance will prepare us to compete in the innovation society into which the developed world is moving very fast. The Ireland we need to create is radically different to what we experience now. Up to now, our tradition, our culture, our view of ourselves, has been overwhelmingly biased towards the humanities, with science playing a subordinate role. Our heroes, our role models, are all biased to the humanities. When we think of ourselves, it is as the country that produced Sheridan and Shaw, O'Casey, Yeats and Heaney, and a long musical tradition.

By and large, this emphasis on the humanities has served us well. Apart from producing giants of the arts, our culture has encouraged a respect for imagination and creativity. That positions us to take advantage of the kind of knowledge-based culture that is emerging, where people's ability to think imaginatively is more important than any physical capabilities they bring to their jobs.

But on its own this creative streak is not enough. We also need, if we are to be at the forefront of this new world, a firm grip of the sciences. This has to come from within ourselves, we cannot import it. If we are to leverage our national advantage in creativity, we must have the technical knowledge to put it to work. We need to become a society where science is recognised as being as much a part of what we are as the arts are today. An example of the lack of balance in our conception of ourselves is in the area of museums. In Ireland, we have a plethora of museums and interpretative centres. Not one of all these centres is science- based. It is almost as though we have erased science from our map of knowledge. Hence the importance of the proposal to provide a Children's Science Centre, which I understand is proposed for 2006. Such a centre, on lines which have been pioneered in major cities around the world, will fill a gap in our educational infrastructure. But to focus the centre exclusively on children is to judge wrongly the scope of the task that lies ahead.

We need to engage the whole population in the wonder of science. We need to convince parents - who play a critical role in the making of their children's career choices - of the potential that is opened up for Ireland if we can succeed in properly embracing the sciences.

Dr Danny O'Hare is chairman of the Task Force on the Physical Sciences

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