Today’s lesson: don’t tell schoolchildren what they’re good at. Sir John Gurdon has just been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. In 2006, he gave a revealing interview at the University of California, Berkeley that discussed epic fails in his education – fails that the Conservative party would do well to take into account when they discuss schools at this week’s conference.
Despite a clear interest in science – as a child he grew thousands of moths from caterpillars, which greatly annoyed his biology teacher – Gurdon was told that he wasn’t suited to the subject. “I have this rather amazing report which, roughly speaking, says I was the worst student the biology master had ever taught,” he says. The report went on to say, “I believe Gurdon has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous.”
Why? Because he wasn’t motivated to learn facts. “If he can’t learn simple biological facts he would have no chance of doing the work of a specialist, and it would be a sheer waste of time, both on his part and of those who would have to teach him.”
As well as the fundamental ignorance of what scientists do (the myth that science is about knowing facts still persists today), it oozes the current ideology of school as a training-ground for future employment. We fail our students if we see education as nothing more than preparation for the workplace.
So, what happened? “For the rest of my school time I studied Latin and ancient Greek,” Gurdon says.
This may have worked in his favour, however. During the interview he revealed that he put part of his later success down to avoiding the drudge of his school’s science teaching: “you’re better off not being taught a subject badly,” he says. “I see it as an advantage to have not had to do the dreary kind of school science that people did have to do at that time.”
The fact is, he was no good at Classics; Oxford University told him explicitly that he would not be allowed to attend to study the very subjects his school had “prepared” him for.
But if his parents hadn’t shelled out for a year’s private science tuition, he wouldn’t have got into science at all. Gurdon gallantly blames all this on the privations of the post-war years, but are things very different today? Probably not, he admits: it would now be impossible to switch between classics and science so late: “nowadays my career would have been impossible,” he says.
Early specialisation, obsession with rote learning, complete ignorance of the requirements of the workplace while nonetheless obsessed with training people for work…it all sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it?
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