Teaching for a new GCSE in natural history looks likely to begin next year. It’s part of the Department for Education’s ‘flagship sustainability and climate change strategy’. Apparently this subject is intended to teach pupils ‘how to keep the world safe’. Baroness Floella Benjamin, for instance, suggests it will show them how they can ‘save the world from catastrophe’.
Paying attention to non-human life might cure some teenagers of their unhealthy obsession with selfies
However well-meant such declarations may be, natural history is in fact about identifying and studying plants and animals, not fretting about ‘the plight of our planet’ and ‘how to rescue it’. Worried about what teenagers would in fact be studying, I wrote to the OCR examination board. It thanked me for ‘taking an interest in [its] GCSE in natural history’, noted that it was ‘currently experiencing a high volume of enquiries’ and promised to get back to me ‘as soon as possible’.
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