I've been paying a small amount of attention to the new national curriculum feeling I should be paying a lot more attention. There is nothing more important than schooling. It determines to some extent how bright and sensible a population is. School is the last time we are forced to have a broad understanding of the world. After that it is all specialisation, at least in educational institutions.

What I have seen appals me. I'm not sure when we were introduced to the periodic table when I was at school, but I think it was grade eight. Certainly no later than grade nine. Yet the new curriculum mandates it only for year 10.

This seems symptomatic of a degeneration in the curriculum which is also present in the fact that it has three streams - "knowledge, inquiry skills and science in society". I have no problems with the first two, assuming that "inquiry skills" is about experimentation, but the last does not belong in a science class.

There is so much to know, and precious little time to acquire the skills and the knowledge without putting some pop-sociology into the course. I do remember our science books having some interesting vignettes in boxes on the pages of our text books about the various discoverers of particular facts and principles, but that is what you read if you finished your problems early. They certainly weren't taught.

The thought that to get a good mark in physics, you might have to regurgitate some of those vignettes, makes me wonder what the point of a national curriculum is at all. In science you should be rewarded for being good at science, not the sociology of science.

Good post Graham

Professor Rice (executive director, Australian Council of Science Deans) also said:

"significant problems with curriculum reform would continue until state authorities supported teachers to take their own learning as seriously as that of their students."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/science-deans-have-doubts/story-e6frg6nf-1225836706893

Your motivation for starting this thread is fine, but for a long time now, we have been getting 'dregs' into tertiary science (not all mind you, there are some very bright students coming through as well, the ones with a real passion and fire in their belly). However, just look at the UAI for many science faculties - that should really be sounding the alarm bells, but it hasn't - why not?

It's as if nobody wants to do science anymore, and that is a very real question. Notwithstanding the political undertones your thread presents, maybe it can be broadened to answering this fundamental question.

Political scientists need not answer :)

By the way, there's more to science than equations and experiments - and there is enough time to read some of those 'vignettes' - if the student could get away from all the other 'pressures' overtaking their lives. Methinks you are going to raise a hornets nest.

Do you know what the 'science in society' component is?

Sociologists, please join the fray.

ps: While not in the syllabus, we learned the periodic table in grade 5, we had a fantastic teacher!

If the science in society component covers, even briefly, the importance and relevance of science to society it may assist with putting into context all those lessons about the basics of science. ie. why it is necessary to know about the periodic table or species classification etal.

My recollection of the periodic table being taught was in Year 10 at a public high school in SA.

There is some time for those 'extras' at school and the wider choice may help some students remain in school. The problem, as someone who once helped in recruiting and training young school leavers, is the literacy and numeracy standards (mostly literacy), have continued to decline. There certainly is a case for a return to the basics in literacy (while still allowing for creative writing).

However, I wouldn't go so far as to say the proposal is appalling or a disgrace unless there is evidence that the basics were being sacrificed for the sociological component of the curriculum.

The ideal would be enough time allocated to the basics of science and available time allocated to expanding on the relevance of science.

Pelican, Pelican, Pelican, where is all this spare time to come from to teach the students? Teachers will tell you that nowadays they are expected to teach kids all sorts of things that parents would have been expected to teach a generation ago.

I don't think you need to put things into a social context to make them interesting. They are interesting in their own right. I don't think any amount of contextualisation would have made calculus more interesting. Perhaps a little more instruction in what it was useful for might have been good, but knowing about the competition between Leibnitz and Newton had little bearing on my interest in cracking the harder questions.

If you want to do sociology you study it. If you want to do science you study it. Mixing sociology with science to keep people interested doesn't turn out more scientists, just a few more sociologists who have a vague understanding of what is involved in chemistry or physics, while potentially penalising the marks of those who are good at the equations and concepts, but couldn't give a toss about the context. Yet the latter are the real scientists.

Yes qanda the enter scores for science at uni are a disgrace. An OP of 17 would get you into Queensland Uni. Yet we're supposed to genuflect to these individuals on matters of science because three years later they come out with a degree! The really smart people generally don't do science, unfortunately, which explains a lot about the debate on a lot of issues.

Graham Y,
You are so right about where is the spare time coming from. However, the school system that we use was developed over 150 years ago and really not designed to turn out scientists - it was designed to give a reasonable knowledge of literacy and numeracy to the bulk of the general population and to instill in them conformity and respect for authority in the new industrialized world - it certainly wasn't designed to light their passions and encourage them to think for themselves. Unfortunately, sitting a child inside a room and sprinkling them with "knowledge" doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to absorb it.
I think that those who excel in a particular interest in any given subject are usually likely to have pursued it outside of school hours where they have the freedom to think for themselves and follow their own leads.
My point is that teaching all children to develop the skills to think for themselves and initiate their own fields of inquiry should be the priority in schooling (after literacy and numeracy). These are the skills that will ignite passions and interests in young people.