There are few debates more critical to the nation’s long-term economic health than that on secondary science education. How fitting, then, that both sides cite in their defence the same former Times sub-editor and his quest for the scientific understanding that he never gleaned at school.

Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything is a compendium of invaluable “scientific literacy”, say those who have made such literacy the core of the national curriculum’s new Twenty-First Century Science project. Critics of the project, including the author of a devastating attack on science education policy on which we report today, hold that the success of Bryson’s book reflects a yearning for scientific knowledge that schools are failing to satisfy. The truth is that scientific literacy is not the same as science, and confusing the two does little for pupils, universities or Britain’s standing as a knowledge-based economy.

It is too soon to know whether the new GCSE science curriculum will boost the uptake of science subjects at A level. It was introduced nationally only last month, after an overhasty evaluation process. But this much is already clear: the number of pupils choosing science A-levels has collapsed in a generation, with physics (down by 56 per cent in 20 years) especially hard hit. The modular structure of most science courses at A level risks undermining their value to both pupils and employers since the modules chosen may not constitute a coherent whole. The knock-on effect of failing to supply universities with enough capable science undergraduates is already clear as research-led firms increasingly recruit talent abroad. And, to reverse the decline of A-level science, top private and state schools have rejected the new GCSE orthodoxy in favour of traditional, separate GCSEs for physics, chemistry and biology.

The upshot is a secondary science education system offering a fast track to excellence for the few, and new, hybrid subjects leaning heavily on a media-led series of broadly scientific discussions for everyone else.

Bryson claims to have been bored by the science teaching that he received at school. He is not alone in having suffered teachers who lacked the wit to explain how Fleming’s right-hand rule or the incandescent properties of burning magnesium might affect — or reflect — the real world. But beating boredom with “relevance” alone is not the answer.

There is nothing wrong with classroom discussions of the ethics of nuclear power or the MMR innoculation, but to let such debates determine the content of science lessons is, as Sir Richard Sykes has argued, “back to front”. They should not be allowed to eat into the 20 per cent of school time earmarked for real science. That time is best preserved for specialists to teach their specialisms. Scientists push back the frontiers of knowledge by standing on the shoulders of giants, or at least of other scientists. Britain needs participants in that endeavour; it risks producing only spectators.