It's that time again for a look at how dumb the public is about science. One in ten children thought the telephone was invented by the Queen, with Darwin coming in second place. One in twenty thought the first man on the moon was Luke Skywalker, or possibly Richard Branson. Some 60% thought Sir Isaac Newton discovered fire.

OK, that's probably enough laughable statistics. However, this was a poll of 1,000 students, across primary and secondary schools, taken in Birmingham, UK. The results don't yet appear online at Birmingham Science City website but have been reported by the BBC.

I do wonder what their general knowledge would be in other spheres. However, one result that is worrying is the steep drop in interest in science as children get older. "In fact, nearly 70% of nine and 10-year-olds would like to be famous
for winning a Nobel Prize in science, yet this drops to only 33% among
11 to 15-year-olds."

This is a problem that has been around ever since I started teaching. However, there didn't appear to be a problem at my school - we had large science classes and the only minority subject was the advanced mathematics course. What seems to have changed is that we expect kids to appreciate science when in the past the proto-scientists would just go ahead with studying the sciences. The problem for science is not that we need everyone to understand science but that those budding scientists get dragged down by their demotivated peers.

The solution? Split the general courses and the specialist courses - not just for the sciences but for everything. At the moment the dumbed down granulated curriculum satisfies neither the best students nor the average. The education department, at least in the UK, is just not listening on this one.