ABSTRACT
One of the major purposes of education, wrote the great critic, Raymond Williams (1961), is ‘that of training the members of a group to the “social character”…by which the group lives’. At a general level, being socialized is an involvement in the problems and struggles of one’s fellow human beings. If this is true of schools then, at the very least, school science should be preparing students for the scientific issues that occur in their lives. Few students at school today would recognize the science curriculum as preparing them to make decisions about such things as local sources of pollution or the ethical questions raised by modern genetics. A formal education in science leaves a small proportion of students with a sense of wonder and a wish to pursue the academic subject further in higher education. Others use it as a route to a variety of careers such as medicine, engineering and hairdressing. But the majority, like the school-girl and her atoms, are left with faint memories of meaningless symbols. There are numerous critiques of the school science curriculum and, since the mid-1980s, of the expanding area of the public understanding of science, but there has been little discussion about the interrelationship between the curriculum and public understanding. It is this relationship between the formal science curriculum and people’s lives-learning science as a socializing experience-that is at the core of this book.
