Connect: The decline of science as a subject for third-level study is evident from published CAO offers. A generation or so ago, science was among the most prestigious of university degrees. Science would, after all, determine the future. People who understood something of its methods and mysteries were generally considered best-placed to shape the coming world.
But science as an academic subject nowadays seems to have all the appeal of a mouldy test-tube. To study it in, for instance, UCD, the country's largest university, requires just 280 Leaving Cert points. This is bizarre, of course, for science remains among the most difficult of all disciplines. Clearly, however, it cannot attract as many of the brightest students as it used to do.
The decline of science is no doubt due, at least in part, to its difficulty. In spite of gushy hype about learning being fun, all serious bodies of knowledge - and notably science - include dry-as-dust aspects. No surprise then that even in secondary schools, the percentages studying physics and chemistry to Leaving Cert level have plummeted to single figures.
Mind you, media images of scientists don't help. Nerdy, bespectacled, white-coated geeks, frequently silly, subordinate or sinister, give science a dowdy image.
Yet, it's not just in education and its media image that science faces difficulties. Perhaps, in a clarion irony, the greatest threat to science comes from technology. That may sound absurd, because technology is really applied science. But the forms of technology favoured by the market tend to be quick applications which can be flogged for big profits.
Computer games, for instance, although they undoubtedly generate entertainment, can hardly be considered great boons to humanity. However, they also generate great profits and consequently are marketed with huge budgets and vigour. Science, for all its championing of rationality, remains subservient to forces that, like marketing, are deliberately anti-rational.
Back in the 20th century, Albert Einstein, a physicist, was routinely held to be the genius of his age. Claims were made for other geniuses, of course, but the greatest physicist was all but undeniable. Within a year of Einstein's death in 1955, Roland Barthes wrote an essay entitled The Brain of Einstein that he opened by stating: "Einstein's brain is a mythical object." It was, and perhaps it still is, but to fewer people, for Einstein's age has passed. It's true that in the 1960s - the decade after his death - that science, boosted by the media's interest in the space race, achieved its greatest popular appeal. Now, however, few want to pursue it either as a course of study or as a career.
Introducing science (or, at any rate, aspects of it) in primary schools and revising the syllabus for Junior Cert students are positive moves. The revised syllabus for the early-secondary-school years is designed to increase interest in science subjects at Leaving Cert level. The Minister for Education and Science, Noel Dempsey, realises that science is "vitally important for Ireland's future". Of course, there are, political issues over funding and resourcing school laboratories for the new programmes. However, even if such problems did not exist, the dominant ideology of contemporary Ireland - in two words "make money" - would not be supportive of any science without quick and profitable technological application.
It's not only in Ireland that science faces such an uncertain future. In Britain, the US and Australia similar declines have been recorded. The Australian Council of Deans of Science, for instance, recently commissioned a substantive, country-wide survey of student enrolments in science at both second and third level education.
The Aussie study showed a clear decline in student engagement with the basic enabling sciences of physics, chemistry and, albeit to a lesser extent, biology, in both schools and universities. So although genetics has long since replaced physics as the "hottest" science, even biology is losing its attractiveness. The pattern repeats itself across most of the wealthy world.
In one sense, the decline of science may be part of a general educational decline in rigour. Even in English, aspects of the subject considered boring, such as grammar and punctuation, are less frequently taught and studied than in the past. Making science more interesting is all very well but if contrived vigour replaces the subject's characteristic rigour, too much may be lost.
Anyway, as the points required to study science in UCD have fallen to 280, those required for, for instance, a degree named "Business and Legal Studies", are pitched at 500. This tells you much about the priorities of contemporary Irish society. Certainly, we need strong business and legal people but such student demand seems disproportionate.
If the Minister is serious about arresting the decline of science, he will fight to fund schools properly. However, given the priorities of his political party and its coalition partners, he won't. There are, after all, more votes in pandering to mainstream commerce than to sidelined science. In politics, the equations are as crude as that.