Elevation of scientific genius has done us a disservice

Arrange a line-up of pictures of the following people: Jimi Hendrix, Albert Einstein, James Joyce, PelΘ and Pablo Picasso. Give it to a class of 12-year-olds and ask them to pick the person they think is a genius. Ask them to do the same thing with more contemporary figures, say Seamus Heaney and Stephen Hawking. As a physics teacher, I am sad to say, they nearly always choose Einstein and Hawking.

You may be surprised this depresses me, but how is it that even pre-teens can recognise the iconic status of great physicists, even when they know nothing about the reasons for their fame?

It seems our technology-based society has defined its image of genius - and I think this hurts our attempts, as physics teachers, to popularise our subject, since we must first overcome the stumbling block that many children have constructed in their minds: geniuses do physics, we're not geniuses.

The erroneous extension of this reasoning is that biology, not being mathematical, is the easy science - a view even perpetuated by some teachers. Scientists and mathematicians in schools can exacerbate poor take-up rates for physics by encouraging the view that it is only for very bright pupils. The result: across Europe the numbers doing these subjects is in decline.

We are approaching a future that will demand the structured reasoning and scepticism of scientific thought, but we are letting our children wander towards it ill-prepared.

Yet science has the capacity to capture and thrill the minds of children like few other topics. Between the dino-mania of the four-year-old and the weary cynicism of the 13-year-old, something has gone badly wrong.

Is it the lack of proper primary-school science? (Primary teachers are not scientists - can they be expected to teach it?) Is it unimaginative Junior and Leaving Certificate syllabuses? At least the Transition Year programme has given scope to science teachers to run with ideas chosen for immediacy and impact, to smash misconceptions about monolithic, humourless, arcane research.

I have taught aspects of space science to Transition Year pupils in Coolmine Community School, Dublin, for six years, and it has brought a certain reward. Projects, web-based research and visits to Armagh Planetarium and Birr Castle have been mixed with topics ranging from the "Big Bang" to life on Mars.

But are there more effective ways to engender interest in the physical sciences? What else could I do? In search of inspiration, I travelled to Holland during the mid-term break to participate in the Teach Space 2001 conference, organised by the European Space Agency (ESA). This meeting was arranged specifically to tackle the issue of declining interest in the physical sciences, and to help teachers redress that decline by encouraging the teaching of space science in all its forms. The cross-fertilisation of ideas among teachers of many disciplines was invigorating.

Among the subjects of 10 presentations given by teachers were: teaching about space through role-play, establishing school programmes for using amateur radio to contact the International Space Station (ISS), constructing and launching water rockets.

The poster displays of 30 more teachers covered the full diversity of space research, its history and its future. There were lectures by ESA personnel about life on the ISS and the ongoing programme for its construction, plus plans for future planetary exploration.

Kathryn Clark from NASA spoke about the ISS as a classroom: "We have the coolest toys!"

Where ESA's lecturers were earnest and precise, the NASA presentation had all the hallmarks of Madison Avenue - smooth, with an upbeat musical intro.

It was this constant reference to the ISS as a classroom that we debated in the group workshops. My group of 15 or so, made up of teachers, museum exhibit designers, and professional astronomers (from Denmark, Finland, France, Holland, Hungary, the United States, Canada and Ireland, of course) had its reservations.

The children I teach have grown up with shuttle launches and Mir, they are used to people in low Earth orbit. They would have to be interested in science already to be automatically hooked by the ISS.

Some of us thought ESA should put more emphasis on the Mars Express mission, to launch in 2003. Mars Express will put a lander down on the surface of the planet. Called Beagle 2, it will search for possible signs of life on the planet. Profound science, yes, but was there ever a mission begging to be represented by a cartoon character on posters on the walls of primary school classrooms all over Europe?

When Mars Pathfinder bounced to a stop and shed its airbags in July 1997, NASA's website could hardly cope with the number of hits from across the globe for days and weeks afterwards. It was one year after a NASA research team announced the discovery of possible fossilised microbes found in a meteorite from Mars.

Beagle 2 is waiting to be exploited for educational purposes. It is trying to answer the biggest of questions, but one that young children can comprehend.

Are we alone in the universe? If science teachers can't exploit that to popularise our subjects, we may end up alone in our classrooms.