Joanne Nova
A prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology. She has given keynotes about the medical revolution, gene technology and aging at conferences.
Let’s not put race politics in our science lessons
Science has no race – it is true, or it isn’t. But once we start deleting one race or judging one scientific hero by the color of their skin, we can still make science lessons racist. It’s just another anti-white virtue-signalling thing. Instead of teaching children how the world works, someone thinks we should teach them topics that make the minister sound good at UN cocktail parties.
The UK Labour government wants to overhaul school science – if only they knew what science was. They got an “independent” review to tell them what they wanted to hear and invited the grovelling Royal Society’s of Science to sell out science to the latest woke intellectual fashion. Shame on them.
Real science is about evidence, not the color of your skin, or the continent your last 1,000 ancestors lived on. It can’t be “de-Westernized” because it isn’t “Western” – the laws of physics work just as well in England as they do in Bangladesh. Hypersonic rockets don’t care what language you speak, penicillin kills streptococcus in the East and the West, and gravity sucks us all. Its universality is what makes science so fantastically useful, and ultimately so unifying. We are all just homo sapiens in this together, trying to comprehend the big world.
Naturally the UK Labour government want to screw that all up, as if science was just another kind of Arts degree:
School science lessons could be ‘de-Westernised’ to highlight discoveries by other cultures in ‘woke’ Labour overhaul of the curriculum
by Greg Heffer at the Daily Mail:
Big Government, payer of almost all the science grants, asked the “science” societies to make up stuff for their PR campaign:
In response to the Department for Education’s call for evidence, top science bodies stressed the importance of teaching ‘non-Western’ contributions to science.
So they can turn science into another social studies unit:
The Royal Society of Biology, Royal Society of Chemistry, and Institute of Physics also said pupils should learn why some cultures were ‘less able to claim credit and ownership for ideas’.
…the Royal Society of Biology’s own submission stated: ‘It is essential that all children feel included in the sciences by valuing their experiences and through the thoughtful use of contexts, imagery and narratives.
All children need to know what science is – they don’t need to be patronized. There’s a devastating condescension, a racist underbelly to the idea that someone with Hispanic, Malaysian, Kenyan or whatever skin can only learn science if we can teach them through neolithic folk songs or just-so-stories about imaginary ancestors. Spare them the soft racism of low expectations. How unforgivably demeaning.
All children should “feel included” in science, because the laws of physics and chemistry apply to them – because they use phones, fly in planes and get x-rays.
Then, after all students learn what science is (observation, hypothesis, prediction, and testing with rigorous skepticism), they can go to social studies classes to find out how scientific heroes changed the lives of millions, and why the discipline of science was crucial to the West, and how the search for truth became embedded in the dominant Western culture.
We don’t want more social studies in our science lessons, we want more science in our social studies…
They can learn the physics of electromagnetism in their science class, and talk about the impact of Michael Faraday in their history lessons and how he had to teach himself, and how his idea of electric fields and electric motors changed the world.
Killing off Western heroes is something communists and enemies want
Deleting the heroes of science (and the heroes of the UK) is a great way to demoralize and divide a generation. Instead of inspiring kids of all colors to grow up to be Alexander Fleming, the Labour Party want to teach children that their culture is not different, not worth fighting for, and not worth passing on to their own kids.
It’s a stupid way to run a country:
The Royal Society of Biology also said it had sought expertise on ‘decolonising the curriculum’ and for a ‘no more heroes’ approach to teaching science in schools.
This would mean ‘avoiding prescriptive lists of historic figures in biology’ and instead ‘exploring opportunities for local, recogniseable, diverse historic and contemporary figures through which discovery and exploration of biological concepts can be explored’.
President Xi would be pleased.
This is a test to see if we will resist. Mock it accordingly so the people that spout this craven nonsense crawl back in their holes.
This article originally appeared at JoNova and was republished by CFACT.
