Why the categories we use to understand the world can obscure the connections between them.
For much of my career, I would have happily told anyone that science simply “wasn’t my thing.” I loved Literature and History. I could spend hours thinking about curriculum, stories, writing and language. Mathematics fascinated me because of its precision and coherence. Science, however, sat somewhere in the background. I admired people who knew it well, but I had convinced myself that it belonged to someone else. Some people were “science people” and I wasn’t one of them.
It wasn’t until recently that I realised I had fallen into exactly the same trap we so often identify in our students. We hear children say, “I’m not into maths,” or a parent describe their child as “more creative than academic,” and we immediately recognise these as limiting beliefs. Yet as adults, many of us carry exactly the same assumptions. We categorise ourselves into subjects we enjoy and subjects we don’t, rarely stopping to question whether those categories actually exist anywhere outside school. Science is perhaps the greatest example of this, it does not know it has been divided into biology, chemistry and physics.
Nature certainly doesn’t. The cells in our bodies are not aware they belong to biology. The oxygen we breathe does not stop at chemistry before becoming physics as it moves through our lungs. Gravity does not recognise curriculum descriptors. Life simply exists as an intricate network of interconnected patterns, relationships and systems that we have gradually learned to understand.
The word science itself comes from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge. Long before science became a school subject, it described humanity’s pursuit of understanding. For centuries, what we now call science was known as natural philosophy which was the study of the natural world and our place within it.
That pursuit changed dramatically during the Enlightenment. Thinkers such as Francis Bacon challenged the idea that knowledge should come primarily from authority or tradition. Instead, he argued that we should observe the world carefully, collect evidence and search for patterns. He understood something that still resonates today: we do not simply replace old ideas with new ones. As he famously wrote, “The mind is not like a wax tablet; on the mind you cannot rub out the old except by writing in the new.” Learning builds upon what we already know.
René Descartes encouraged systematic doubt, not as an act of scepticism, but as a disciplined pathway towards truth. Isaac Newton demonstrated that the same laws governing the movement of planets also explained the fall of an apple. Antoine Lavoisier revealed that matter is conserved through chemical change, transforming chemistry from speculation into a rigorous science. Charles Darwin showed that the extraordinary diversity of life could be understood through natural selection rather than mystery alone. Dmitri Mendeleev recognised an underlying order in the elements before many had even been discovered. Each scientist contributed something profound, but perhaps their greatest achievement was not simply what they discovered. It was the demonstration that beneath apparent complexity lies order, pattern and an intelligible universe.
As knowledge expanded, no one person could master every field. In fact, scientists are incredibly focused on proving or disproving highly specific hypotheses. The irony is that while their work often becomes increasingly specialised, the knowledge it produces helps reveal an increasingly connected picture of reality. This is the very paradox that Edward O. Wilson explores in Consilience: the deeper we dig into individual disciplines, the more we discover that they are all describing the same world.
Natural philosophy gradually separated into disciplines - biology, chemistry, physics, geology, psychology and sociology. These divisions helped us organise knowledge, specialise and make extraordinary progress. Yet they also created the illusion that these disciplines exist independently of one another. The concept of Consilience argues that reality itself has never been divided. Only our study of it has. Biology does not stop where chemistry begins. Psychology does not end where sociology starts. They are different lenses through which we understand the same world. Schools, however, sometimes forget this.
We present science as a timetable allocation, a collection of descriptors or a series of disconnected topics to cover before moving on to the next unit. We talk about science as inquiry and as a human endeavour, but sometimes in doing so we underplay the extraordinary body of knowledge that humanity has accumulated over centuries.
Science is not merely a way of asking questions; it is humanity’s collective memory of the answers we have discovered so far. Schools have the responsibility of ensuring every child inherits that memory before asking them to extend it. This is where my thinking has shifted most.
When we talk about the Science of Reading, the Science of Learning or the Science of Behaviour, we are not referring to fashionable labels or educational movements. We are referring to bodies of knowledge built over time through observation, experimentation and the careful testing of ideas. Science doesn’t ask What do we believe? it asks, What patterns have we consistently observed, tested and supported by evidence?
Those patterns are evident in how children acquire language, build knowledge, remember information, respond to different environments, develop relationships and learn to participate in communities. While these patterns are often studied within different disciplines, they are all describing the same human being.
Philosophies often begin with ideals about how learning ought to occur. Science begins by asking what actually happens when human beings learn. Both have something to contribute, but they are not the same thing. This distinction is important because children are not abstract educational theories. A child is simultaneously a biological organism, a chemical system, a physical body and a social being. Therefore, to understand our students, we need to understand something about all of those things.
If we accept that some students are simply “science people” while others naturally belong in the arts, we deny every child access to one of humanity’s greatest achievements: understanding how the world works.
Science does not diminish creativity; it enriches it. It does not compete with literature or history; it helps explain them. It does not reduce life to facts; it reveals the astonishing patterns that connect them. Perhaps this is why science deserves a far more central place in our thinking about curriculum.
Not because every child will become a scientist, but because every child is already living inside the systems science seeks to explain. Understanding those systems makes us better equipped to care for ourselves, one another and the world we inhabit.
Science is a body of knowledge that all our students deserve to inherit. Perhaps that is the real purpose of education. To ensure that every generation inherits the best explanations humanity has discovered so far, not so they stop asking questions, but so their questions can take them somewhere further than they could ever have reached alone.
