I HAVE JUST read a report demonstrating that 41 per cent of A-level biology students can’t tell the difference between cow parsley and a daisy. This is something of a dismaying statistic when you bear in mind that cow parsley covers the banks and roadsides and paths of the countryside in white cumulus clouds 6ft high, and that every decent lawn in the country is studded with constellations and galaxies of daisies.

Students were given illustrations of ten common plants: the two named, foxglove, primrose, ragwort and so on. I’m pretty hopeless at plant recognition and I got nine, and the one I got wrong was a confusion of scale. This test was the easiest and peasiest you could imagine.

Yet 86 per cent of the students could name only three flowers or fewer, and the already mentioned 41 per cent could name one or none. Ten per cent knew none whatsoever. To make things fair, teachers were tested as well: 29 per cent recognised three or fewer and 65 per cent five or more.

This asks some intriguing questions about schooling. Education appears increasingly to be a means of gaining qualifications rather than actually understanding anything. Biology divorced from the living world is an arid pursuit indeed. Students, even at A level, are not learning but playing the Glass Bead Game: education for the sake of education, rather than knowledge.

But this desperate ignorance implies sadder things about our understanding of the world. The more we lose touch with the living non-human world around us, the more we lose touch with what it is to be truly human. The importance of the non-human world is part of all of us, manifested in our passions for gardening, pets and David Attenborough.

But we are losing touch with the wild world that begins at our doorsteps. If the young people who are supposed to be studying the science of life can’t tell a foxglove from a primrose when the wind is southerly, then the world is madder than I thought.

• PART of the problem is paedophiliaphobia. When I was 10, I used to get the 49 bus every Saturday from Streatham to South Kensington and spend my day at the Natural History Museum. No child would be permitted to do such a thing these days.

  I went there on Wednesday, taking my older boy. Many conservationists and naturalists spent much of their childhood in the countryside: either alone, with a friend, or with sympathetic adults who showed them wild things in an innocent manner no longer imaginable. Rob Hume, in his excellent book Life with Birds, talks of being adopted and instructed and enlightened by local birdwatchers in the most natural way possible.

  These days, trips to the wild are not encouraged. A school “field trip” with your mates is infinitely better than nothing, but it is not the same as seeing for yourself. The world is becoming a no-go area for the young: a terrible loss. These days, the great outdoors has been reduced to a shopping mall: a cow-parsley-free zone.

• THE BORNEO rainforest is thrilling, mysterious and frightening, especially if you choose to take a stroll on your own. I know, I’ve done it, and seen rhinoceros hornbill as a result, despite a brief but sincere attack of funk. You have a feeling, along those dim, cathedral pathways, that anything in the world could turn up.

  Now I learn that something new has indeed turned up: a beast like an oversized puss-cat with a huge bushy tail. It has been snapped twice by camera traps run by a WWF project, and they believe it is a completely new species of carnivore, which would make it the first to be recoded on Borneo for more than 100 years. Now they are trying to trap one alive.

  WWF is involved in the Heart of Borneo initiative, which has the aim of encouraging the three Borneo nations, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, to conserve 22 million hectares of rainforest. But the Indonesian Government is planning the world’s largest palm oil plantation, half the size of the Netherlands, right on the spot. So the mystery beast’s habitat could be wiped out before anybody knows what the damn thing is.

  I often wonder how the people of the 22nd century will curse us: the last generation that had a chance to get it right. And if the world’s biologists of the future are stumped by the sight of a daisy, we have more problems than we realised.

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