Time to Question the Science? A Conversation with Subhadra Das

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The onus is on those scientists to become much more cognizant about the history of where their ideas come from. And the onus is on us as non-scientists to be much more scientifically literate. So then it should be no surprise that the more we mix these things up and the more voices that we get in and the better we can work across these very arbitrary divides of discipline, the things start to get better for everyone.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining us again on the podcast this week. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. One of the things that I enjoy doing on the podcast is problematizing many of the disciplines that we usually learn in school. In previous episodes with many guests, we've questioned maths, languages, economics, history, and physical education, but we haven't yet taken a critical look at science itself, which is not only a set of disciplines but also an approach and methodology that underpins a lot of the logic of how many like to imagine We direct education. Apparently it tells us what works, doesn't it? This week it's a massive pleasure to be chatting with the delightful and funny Subhadra Das. She's a historian, writer, broadcaster, comedian, and storyteller who looks at the relationship between science and society. Subhadra specializes in the history and philosophy of science, particularly the history of scientific racism and eugenics, and for 9 years she was the curator of the science collections at the University College London. Subhadra has also appeared on radio and TV as a stand-up comedian, and in this In this conversation, we talk about her fantastic recent book, Uncivilized: 10 Lies That Made the West. Hi, Subhadra. Such a pleasure to be able to have this conversation. I've been really looking forward to after reading your amazing book, given that we're just, yeah, in the aftermath of the Trump election. It feels like there's a lot in there that we could talk about in this book. Amazing stuff about democracy and justice and all sorts, but what I'm I'd love to talk to you about today is the science, actually, the history of the science, which is kind of where you are coming from. But yeah, thank you so much for joining and chatting today.

Oh, thanks so much for engaging with the book to the degree that you've done. Like, that's the most gratifying thing.

So thank you. No, it's an amazing book. Genuinely, I'd really highly recommend it. But as I say, the thread that runs through it is something coming from your own background in as a historian of science. So there's in all of the chapters, whether it's about death or justice or democracy, there's this, the kind of historical perspective on a scientific frame that's coming through. But yeah, perhaps, I don't know, maybe we could just start if you, how did you come to writing the book? What, how did it come up for you and throughout your kind of professional life and these, these questions that you were holding?

That is an excellent question. Thank you. Because it gives me right at the chance, right at the top to shout out and give credit to my amazing editor, Harriet Poland. So this book was Harriet's idea. I think the original conversation was, or the title was something like Ten Trappings of Western Civilization. And Harriet not only came up with the idea for the book but also saved me from— I think, like a lot of people, I was working on a book during lockdown that never happened. That was going to be a much more straightforward history of eugenics and the eugenics movement and, you know, who was Francis Galton and what was all this going on. And that one never quite materialized, but this one then intervened. But as you say, those ideas to do with the history of science and critical eugenics really run all the way through this book. It's sort of a different approach to how I was going to do it, but I think much of what I was thinking of in terms of two things about eugenics that people should know: one, it's a much bigger idea than people think it is, and also it never went away. And so it was an interesting challenge to be able to look at these 10 different topics, starting with science, to see just how much it's got its tendrils into our society and our ways of thinking.

Maybe that's a place to start then, just because of your role as being in charge of the Galton Collection at UCL. Because as soon as you bring up eugenics at a dinner party or wherever, you know, you're— there's like stony silence in the room, right?

Because I dream of stony silence. I usually get, but we were always racist, weren't we?

Yeah. So there's maybe making the connection for people just as a context from, you know, who was Francis Galton. And as you say in the book, it kind meeting Francis Galton blew everything you knew about science out of the water, which— and so maybe that's a good place to start, because clearly eugenics at the time was seen as science very much, right?

Absolutely. And that is why I tend to fight descriptions of eugenics as pseudoscience. I think people who use that term are fairly well-intentioned, and I think they go to maybe disproved science might be a good kind of middle ground. But yeah, exactly as you say, Galton thought of it as a science. He was working in scientific circles. He was highly influential in his own time. And in the ways these things work. If it walks like a science and talks like a science, it's a science. So yes, exactly that. And I, like it turned out most of the people that I met in the course of my work as curator of the Galton Collection, had never really heard about him. I certainly never heard about him at school. Yeah. That was the case for a lot of the students that I worked with at UCL. It was the case for actually a lot of the staff I worked with at UCL. And the picture that emerged in the time I was curator of the Galton Collection, nearly 10 years, so from 2012 until 2021, was a very fragmentary picture. So people who studied psychology, for example, would know about his groundbreaking work in, in that area. UCL encompasses a department called the Jill Dando Institute for Crime Science, and they knew all about him and his work on fingerprinting. Obviously, the departments of genetics and statistics knew who he was because he's such a foundational figure in those topics. But it was this very bitty picture. They all had some ideas of some of the things. Very seldom did any of them talk about the eugenics, which is interesting because the eugenics, like, to my mind, is is the overarching theme of Galton's work. He's a statistician at heart. That's his method. Those are the things that he develops, the tools that he develops, and, you know, is still famous for today. But the ways in which ideas to do with statistics— which, remember, the meaning of the word statistics is the science of the state— and how those ideas fed into his ideas for eugenics, also his racism and his colonialism, and how those ideas fed into his science, to me, you know, it was a long journey that I had to do, lots of learning.

Yeah, by myself. Absolutely. As I've done, it's been fascinating. But why should educators care about Francis Galton? Because I think there's— for me, there are so many of his, like, the tendrils of his ideas which are in education, right? In schooling, informal education. It's everywhere.

100%. I couldn't agree with you more. And that is the reason why. But also, here's another reason, and this is why this story and this history has been so compelling to me as a non-white person who used to work in a predominantly white institution. It's impossible to— well, I mean, plenty of people have tried and succeeded, but my mind, it's impossible to talk about Galton without talking about the history of race science, without talking about our ideas of race, how they were constructed, how they were originally scientific ideas to start with. And again, none of this happened at school. I learned about some history of science in science class. I learned a fair bit of science in science class, probably not as much as they wanted me to. And I learned a lot of history in history class. But the combination of the two didn't really happen. And here was the other thing, just to try to be more positive about it. When you put Francis Galton back into the history that we are taught at school, when you put the history of race science, the history of colonialism and imperialism into that story, the things that I learned at school suddenly made a lot more sense. A history that seemed disparate, that seemed unconnected, suddenly I had connected tissue. I had ways of making connections between those two things. Yeah. It's like connecting the bits of history you already knew with the bits that you didn't.

Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing for me about Galton is how, I mean, he was completely obsessed, as many other people in the 19th century were, with measuring things, right? Yeah. So there was this deep belief that it almost like it didn't exist if you couldn't count it or measure it somehow. So he was like, I mean, he was measuring things like the connection between people at dinner parties by measuring the amount of pressure that they're putting on their arm of their chair as they lean towards the person next to them. I mean, he was— and measuring the attractiveness of women as he walked around like a seedy man in Glasgow streets or some— wherever it was. I mean, just completely obsessed with measuring. And I think that's also part of what the educational inheritance has been. It's like this still a very deep belief that it doesn't exist if you can't measure it.

It's a— that is a really excellent point. And you are absolutely right. And it will be the thing that I will always argue for in terms of Galton's unique contribution, whether we acknowledge it or not. And I've just read a book by a brilliant American science historian called Eric Peterson, which is called The Shortest History of Eugenics. And he makes a really compelling case that, you know, there were lots of people practicing lots of versions of eugenics, particularly in the United States, that had never heard of Galton. But while I will always make a case for Galton and why he is important in the history of eugenics, but also the history of statistics and genetics, exactly as you say, is this obsession with measurement and this idea that if it's not a science unless it's measurable. And what he was doing with his anthropometric laboratory, for example, which is, you know, where people would come in, they would pay 3 pence and they would have their pedigree taken and measurements of their body and various physical abilities taken. He was doing on the macro scale, he was doing at the level of skin and bone, what we continue to do at the level of the gene. He sets up the model for how we study people.

Absolutely. And he was the person that coined the term eugenics, right?

Yes, he absolutely was. I mean, I'm kind of with Peterson, which is like, again, it doesn't need to necessarily be called that in order for people to be sterilizing people with learning disabilities without their consent, for example, or coming up with pictures of breeding communities, you know, and controlling who is and isn't allowed to have children on various arbitrary—

Yeah, absolutely. But I guess the science part of the story is that it was something about using what they thought was the best and latest cutting-edge certainties about the world to, to manipulate and control the world somehow. So science was implicated in this desire to then make a better society. I mean, it was seen, it was given quite a positive gloss that they were trying to improve society, right? Through science. I mean, that's what science does, doesn't it?

Yeah. That's very much the brand as to how it presents itself.

Yeah, exactly.

If anyone looks at the history, it turned out, yeah, it didn't really work in those ways. So yeah, and but also you make a very important point, and I would agree, which is definitions of eugenics have to encompass some level of state involvement or governmental control. There are muddy waters, there's a lot of gray area in terms of what is eugenics and what isn't. And yeah, as far as my definition is concerned, it's science used by the state to control people's reproductive freedom. I think that's the way that I mostly think about it. But yeah, science as set up as apolitical. So we need to remember that eugenics 100 years ago, at the turn of the 20th century and into the 1920s, crossed the political spectrum. Whether you were on the left or whether you were on the right, uh, whether you were the Fabian Society or whether you were Winston Churchill, the science was going to be the thing that was going to save— let's be generous and say save us. Some of those definitions of us were very much save the British Empire, right, and save the British race.

Yeah. And I mean, that's something that comes across really strongly in the book, is like you problematizing, I mean, almost that's the book, right? You problematize this view that, like you say at one point, what's not to love about science? And we still, again, in education, I have this conversation regularly. It's like, well, we look to the science for the, some people look to the science for an objective, in inverted commas, steer on what we should do, how we should proceed, right? Whether it's in terms of assessment or in terms of the way we teach is, you know, the way learning happens. It's like, well, look at the science cuz the educational science tells us, you know, as though it's, it doesn't have implicit values built into it. It's like somehow this objectivist frame.

Yeah. This purporters neutrality.

Right.

And that was what I was, I think, intent on getting across was this thing is not neutral and it's, it's bound up with ideas of Western supremacy, of white supremacy. And that those things are so inherent as to become invisible and kind of unquestioned. I always think it's interesting to confront people with this notion because generally the reaction is always quite violent. It's always quite violent and quite negative. How dare you? No, of course not. And I think if you didn't know about it in the first place, I don't see why that reaction would always be so strong. To me, the properly scientific way when confronted with a new piece of data, be it historic or scientific, whatever your definition of that is, would be to say, oh, it's interesting, what's that? How valid is that actually? Is it possible? Yeah, let's look at this a bit more closely. What, what's the data involved? What are the stories involved? What are you talking about? As opposed to, how dare you?

Yeah. And I can almost send, you know, I can almost feel it from some of the listeners right now listening to this as maybe as science teachers and think, well, this just something we teach our young people about how the world works. I mean, it's, it's a neutral discipline that teaches our young people the best of what we understand about how the world works. So how can you challenge that? Right. So I, yeah, I mean, it's a very balanced book. I don't want to like, it's not a polemic against science, right? What, how would you respond in, in with that in mind?

I think that's very generous. Unfortunately, polemic is kind of where I live naturally, my natural bent. Is toward the extremes. And I, every day, I have to fight that because it's unhelpful. However, I'm really pleased, actually. Thank you for saying that you feel that it's not a stick to beat scientists with, this book. And yeah, do you know what? If I didn't care about science in our contemporary world, I wouldn't have made an effort to write about the ways in which I think it is being unhelpful, right? That isn't to say that I don't find it helpful otherwise. Yeah, you know, I've lined up to take my vaccine in 2021. Yeah, so in discovering this history, my point of view has always been, guys, it turns out that this house of science, this house of Western civilization, it's built on rotten foundations. It's built on bad ideas. It's built on racist ideas. It's built on highly unhelpful ideas that dehumanize people, that leave out their histories, their stories, and their humanity. Let's do better, shall we?

Yeah, because there's also a methodological aspect to science that I don't hear you or read you as disparaging. And this is, I'd love to talk about anthropology in a minute, cause there's a great section about Maslow and the anthropologist, but the, there's something importantly deeply rooted and grounded and cultural about the way that it evolved. But there's also this thing about the method through which we come to know the world somehow, right? And then we teach that to other, our youngest humans about how they might know the world. There's something there that doesn't have no value, right?

Entirely. But then again, it's a question of where we ascribe the value. So actually I might, if you forgive me, I might jump a little bit forward. So the story of Abraham Maslow is, is what makes up the last chapter of the book. And Maslow, most people will be familiar with his name as the propounder of the hierarchy of needs, this very foundational aspect of developmental psychology. But what they may not know about is that the inspiration for that scientific theory, which is a creative act, right? There's a lot of creativity involved in how science works as well. The inspiration for Maslow's hierarchy of needs came from the Blackfoot Nation, which is an Indigenous American group whose nation straddles modern-day Canada and the United States. And the ways in which he observed the Blackfoot people, the ways in which they treat their children, is very different from how we treat children in, in so-called modern Western society. They give children a lot of credit as kind of fully formed human beings. They give their children a lot of responsibility and a lot of kind of invested power and authority in terms of when it comes to running their society. So there are other ways, and, and other people have other ways in which they treat young people in their society. I don't know why I keep talking about the pandemic. I think it's really kind of at the forefront of my mind for various reasons to do with a lot that's happening in the world today. But I would argue that the pandemic really demonstrated that the points of formal education in Western countries was a place for people to be able to park their children in order for them to be able to go to work and be productive units of society in a very capitalist way, right?

Absolutely.

Work. And it became very clear that when parents became directly responsible for the education of their children, either that was all that was happening or it was not happening at all. Do you know what I mean? It's like, and particularly with small children, the sheer amount of effort and time that it takes to take care of small children, I think is something that was so undervalued in our society. Other people do it differently. And so, you know, there are other models that we can build on.

Yeah. And what I understood from that story was the connected to what you've just been saying, there was something about the Blackfoot Nation didn't stipulate that people had to work to prove their worth somehow, right? It was like you just were worthy. Right? By virtue of being there in the community, you didn't have to prove it by being a productive unit of the industrialized system. You just were. And that's part of where they chose, how they chose to support each other, work together culturally that evolved over time, blah, blah, all of those things. But did that challenge Maslow's idea about society or how, how was he coming into that?

He came into it from a very well, from a very traditional behaviorist psychology mode at the turn of the 20th century. So I expect your listeners in particular will be very familiar with, you know, B.F. Skinner, who put pigeons in boxes, and these very mechanical explanations for humans and how human society works. And Maslow had come up with his, his grand unifying theory of psychology for Maslow was a thing that he called his theory of sexual dominance, which is that he said that power is inherent in the most sexed of the people in society. And so he, you know, he developed this questionnaire. This is all based on observation of monkeys in captivity to start with, dubious and a little bit problematic in itself. But he'd come up with this questionnaire that he had been getting students at Columbia, or wherever he was teaching on the East Coast, to fill in these questionnaires. And his theory was, you know, that the people who were the most sexually adventurous or the most sexually powerful were the ones with the greatest level of confidence. And, you know, they were like the people who were at the forefront of society. It's a very Andrew Tate way of looking at the world, which is So again, we're on to the disgusting.

Yeah.

Um, and so it was Maslow's sheer good luck, I would argue, that he falls in with a bunch of anthropologists, notable amongst whom is a woman called Ruth Benedict, who was one of a generation of anthropologists who followed in the wake of a guy called Franz Boas, German-Jewish immigrant to the US. In fairness, there was so much that I could have written about Boas, and it's really— he's so important, and again, equally problematic. But what's important for us to know about Boas is he's an anthropologist, but he's not a white supremacist, which makes him very different from all the anthropologists who are working around him at the time. And therefore his students take up this mantle as well. What can these other non-white, so-called uncivilized societies tell us about the world?

Yeah.

And so, yeah, Ruth sends Maslow off to the Blackfoot and she says, okay, we'll see whether they'll fill in your questionnaire. And it's quite a rude awakening for him when they don't.

Yeah. And the best line in the book is she told him to pull his head out of his ass to actually go and find out for himself.

Yes. Well, I was just paraphrasing what happened.

Yes, exactly. But I, I find that really interesting. I mean, I'm biased cuz I'm an anthropologist myself, but I'm, I find that really interesting because there is a somewhat of a scientific, a social scientific frame for, you know, understanding the world, which is methodologically different. It's like going in and being with and understanding from trying to go in without pre-prepared questions about what you're gonna see or pre-prepared questionnaire about, you know, what you're gonna find out. It's a learning disposition somehow. That's a slightly romantic view. And I recognize there was a deep problematic colonial project going on through anthropology as well. But people, yeah, people like Ruth Benedict, I think, are absolutely amazing. And another one of her quotes that you quote in the book, which I think is the move of like universalizing science as a basis for knowing the world, she says, eternal values are themselves suspect. And so this idea that the science tells us what is eternally true and we should follow that, anything that says that, that it is true for all time in all places. And that seems on the surface to be a quite an unscientific thing to say, but I, it feels to me like we're coming to a point where we're realizing that that is, I don't know, there's a deep grounded emergence of difference in important ways that comes from different things, interactions, community, relate, whatever it's, whether it's human or non-human. Things in different, in particular places are quite distinct culturally, contextually. And I think the science is beginning to recognize that you don't have to have a universal law that works for everything, for all time, for all people, for it to be scientific. So that was probably badly explained, but I'm trying to—

No, no, no. Let the, let the listeners, I mean, they can't tell, but like I was nodding all the way through that. It's just like very yes. Yes, 100%. I asked you at the top about whether swearing was allowed on this podcast, and you very generously said yes, but don't do it all the time. But I am going to apologize for the word I'm about to use, which is epistemology. How do we know the things that we know, that we know them to be true? And I think that's the thing that's at stake here, is that race science or colonial science, and in the ways in which imperial science was carried out in the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th 21st centuries.

Yeah.

What's inherent in that notion of science is this idea of epistemological supremacy as well. This is the only way to know things. This is the only correct way to know things. And by definition, if you argue with this science, you are then by definition wrong. Which I think we, you know, we can argue that in theory, we can argue the toss about that in various kind of different ways. And the whole religion versus science thing is a conversation that continues to crop up. But what I wanted to draw attention to was just how dangerous this idea was when it was applied to people.

Yeah.

Because when it was applied to people, and particularly to non-white people because it was applied through the racial frame, was that it completely diminished their humanity in a way in which they— and I'm going to say we as well because I'm not white— have no right of return. Yeah. Because if I look at you and I say to you I'm a human too. You have to take my word for it. There's no way that I can demonstrate that to you scientifically. And so, and if I gave you, you know, a slice of my skin to put under the microscope to be able to demonstrate that the cells look the same, or if I gave you a drop of my blood— sorry, I'm now becoming very Shakespearean— is, you know, the ways in which Western science conceived of humanity was it took humanity away from non-white people, and it also took away their ability to argue for their own humanity.

Yeah. So I, I was never imagining we would go here, but to where I'm about to go, but I was recently doing some research into Descartes, right? And you know, the cogito ergo sum, like as a kind of a really fundamental foundation of the separation of mind and matter and some of the origins of science and not quite, but you know, important rocket fueling of science, right? When you actually understand what he was doing, he was actually saying that you have to experience in the meditations. That's why his book was called The Meditations. You have to experience the phenomenology of reflecting on your own self, reflecting on yourself, right? This was like a, and lived experience of this moment of metacognition or whatever we might call it now. That gets completely written out of the history where we say, oh, it's all just separated and we separate mind from matter and we can basically do what we like with matter and we can control it and we can, you know, that's the product of science and that creates the individual. And you know, then it, then it rocket fuels all of the Western project, colonial project.

That very basic imperialism. Yeah. Right.

Absolutely. But if you understand what he was saying, I think it wasn't necessarily that. So I guess all I'm reflecting on is that, you know, there's nuances that get lost in all of this work, right? And they're all problematic. They're all historically situated in, in ways that were of their time, right? So they were probably all misogynists. All, you know, white supremacists in all sorts of ways. They were a product of their time. But there are nuances that sometimes get lost in the telling, I think.

100%. And this is going to sound like a cop-out, but yeah, I had to encompass everything that you've just talked about, and also the fact that Descartes had his own ideas of demons, and he had his own ideas that the world was controlled by this overarching— it comes across as a sort of satanic force. I don't think he would have called it that, but that's kind of the reference that I think about it through. All of that had to be condensed into a single sentence, and I feel like this is how— yeah, this is where we all do ourselves a disservice. But yes, you're right, what happened there is kind of like through— and again, through the imperial lens, through a picking and choosing, through a very particular idea of what enlightenment science is and should be. Yeah, in the context of empire, in the context of growing imperial power. Becomes transformed into something else. Because actually what Descartes is, is talking about is a very deep introspection and look at humanity and what it means to be human. Yeah. And so therefore, when we— yeah, when we concentrate on that one little phrase, we lose huge amounts.

But to come back to Benedict, that's exactly what what science does so well is that it presents itself as this universalized frame. It's like it doesn't matter about context. It just, these things are true because they've been scientifically demonstrated to be true.

Mm-hmm.

And as soon as you start doing that, you flatten any sense of historical kind of relationships that have brought you to that point at which you're saying that, you know, it's, it's an, science is an incredibly powerful tool that has been wielded. Yeah.

It's also a very blunt one.

Yeah.

Used to bludgeon other people.

So maybe this is a good point to just if we may transition to your own experience of education that you talk about in the book, because as I understand it, you were in international schools in the Middle East and yeah, you talk about being the brown girl in the white curriculum, or as I heard you say, which I did love the—

It's like the Boney M song nobody wanted. Yeah. I love that song.

The Boney M song that nobody's ever heard of. Yeah.

Yeah.

The brown girl in the curriculum. But no, just to, 'cause that, again, there's a really powerful interaction with your dad that you talk about in relation to education. So yeah, if you could just speak a bit about what was your own experience of education from this universalizing kind of Western science frame that we've just been talking about.

I mean, again, yeah, so universalizing is pretty much a blunt instrument. In this case, let's imagine a rolling pin. It's like I was, I was flattened into shape basically. And yeah, the interaction with my dad was, there was one point when, yeah, I think it was 10th grade world history, and my friend Melissa, who was English, and I were doing a project about the Raj. We were doing a project about the British in India, her being British and me being Indian. It's quaint, no? And so, yeah, my dad saw what I'd done kind of with that project and was looking at what we were being taught, and really the only time he really took any kind of interest in the details of my education. Yeah, and he just went quiet for a bit and, and did that thing that dads do, which is sort of look into the middle distance Yeah, you know, they, they don't teach you everything. And it's one of those moments I kind of wish I could go back to and go, what do you mean? My dad was born in 1934. So when partition came around in 1947, he was a teenager. He would have witnessed violence beyond what any of us can actually imagine, unless of course we've all been watching the footage coming out of Gaza. That is the level of hideousness that he would have witnessed and encountered that, you know, his fellow citizens did unto each other because suddenly there was a border drawn in West Bengal that hadn't existed there before. And I know for a fact that it changed his view on who people are in the world in ways it would've been interesting for me to know more about how he grappled with. So I regret not asking that question. My defense is I was 15 and stupid, but also 15 and steeped in a Western curriculum and Western history. And so I think I, I almost remember my reaction at the time was, well, duh, Obviously they don't teach you everything, you know, we had to learn some, we had to pick and choose, had to learn some things. And so with, with a bit of generosity to myself as time has gone on, which is I have now started to unpick what they picked and chose in terms of what that teaching was. Yeah. So yeah, thanks, Dad.

Yeah.

There's so many things I wish I'd listened a bit more carefully.

Yeah.

Too late now.

But it, I mean, it's, it's kind of obvious, isn't it? But it's such an important insight that they, that curriculum, wherever you are, that curriculum is chosen. By a certain group of people based on whatever agenda that group of people have, however generous or not, it, you know, but they can't teach you everything. So obviously it is at surface level, obviously true. But importantly, there are patterns that we can see about what has been taught as more somehow important things to know about the world than other things, right? There is, again, there are values implicit in the choices, you know, just like there are in the science.

Entirely. And this is what I mean about why he didn't interact with the, with the content of it so much. One other thing my dad always told me was, once you have your education, no one can take that away from you. And that's him talking to his daughter, who is a brown girl in a white world, right? Because what he's saying is, you, yeah, you have to learn this stuff, you have to pass these tests and these exams, and you have to do well. Because without any of this, first of all, your standing is zero. But what's also really important is once you have this standing, it's something that's inalienable. And so he understood the political value of education, whether or not he disputed what the content was. You know, he had to swallow that, he had to keep that to himself. What he knew was I had to get through high school and get my diploma, and I had to go to university and get my degree. And at that point, it would not do to question what it was I was being taught. It wouldn't do to question who those railways in India were being built for. It wouldn't do to question the mechanics of how the world's largest democracy was created and how many people died as a result.

Yeah, no, absolutely. But it's interesting. I mean, it's just such a big open question to me about how might we do that differently, because you want to give young people a grounding in a knowing of the world. And I've been, so many of my conversations in recent episodes have been about this question of, it's an epistemological question, right? How do you provide to young people multiple frames through which they might see the world without disorienting them at a point when they're just trying to figure out who they are and what, how they, like, how their immediate world works, right?

It's, it's really not a straightforward question to me, but I would agree, but I think I wanna, sorry to interrupt you, but I, I, I wanna take you back to just how And I, by the way, I did really well at school. I don't know if that's coming across, but when it came to the white curriculum, tick, done. I played that game. But again, what I said right at the beginning of when we started talking was it didn't really make any sense. It's like I memorized this stuff. I know the dates, I know the names and things. But in terms of that, again, critical thinking, but also in terms of that synthesis, how do I put together a picture of the world? It only started to make more sense more recently. And then through sheer accident of what my day job happens to be. Who knows what would have happened if I didn't get that job and what I would think of the world.

Yeah.

Now, so yeah, I appreciate it's challenging and I appreciate that, you know, that for— and also like in white places for white kids, it can be very uncomfortable to learn about the history of, you know, the nation that you purportedly belong to. Although I would then direct people to Chapter 7 to suggest, you know, that this is also a made-up construct in terms of nationality and national allegiance, but and also then think about how difficult it is for the kids of immigrants, you know, for Black kids in this country, for brown kids in this country. Think about how awkward it is for them just to start with.

Absolutely, completely. I mean, as I say, it being challenging is therefore not that we shouldn't grapple with it and we should just get, you know, just assume that what we've got is good enough. Because it's— I think the same question is just as alive in India today, for example, in a, in some kind of a national curriculum. How does that not become How is that not used as an ideological tool for people making the decisions about what goes into the curriculum? I'm not saying I'm, I'm no expert about the Indian education system. I'm just, I'm just saying it, that question is always there. I think when you are choosing what should go into a curriculum, and actually some people would just get rid of the curriculum and, and work with the young people where they are and how they're exploring the world. And that's a different choice, but it's still an ideological choice in a way.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but I just, if I may, one of the other things I was thinking about as you were saying that was the Saturday schools, cuz you talk about the Saturday schools in around the UK and just how self-organizing communities grew up around this question of the mainstream in inverted commas education system was making choices and, and teaching things which were totally disconnected from the lived reality of some people. And not only that, but they were also categorizing some of them as educationally subnormal Black young people who were just, I mean, horrendous, horrendous stuff.

Yeah.

But at the same time, there was self, there were communities self-organizing to say, actually, we want a space where the curriculum is more connected to the cultural lived reality of the cultures we are bringing into the space and how we are living together. And, and that then was just a space they created on Saturday mornings. And it, it's something there for me again about multiple frames that allow people to, I don't know, to, to hold multiple epistemologies or multiple ways of seeing the world together to problematize both. Cuz no, no one frame is complete, I would argue.

Yeah, entirely. And I think what I want to add to that is the chapter on education has the most extensive quotes from other people, I think, or possibly chapter 10 as well, because there's the quote from, from John Fire Lane Deer as well. But what I wanted to to have those Saturday school teachers speak in their own words was because what was so powerful about what they were saying was exactly as you mentioned earlier, this is about we want to imbue our students with confidence about who they are as Black children.

Yeah.

You know, we see them being, first of all, diminished by institutional racism in the school system. So I would recommend there's a brilliant documentary, The Hope, on BBC iPlayer called Subnormal, where some very, very brave and courageous people told the stories of what happened to them when they were deemed to be so-called educationally subnormal. Because yeah, it was— the racism was instrumentalized through the education system. And this is what those parents were reacting to, was the idea that their children were being marginalized and diminished simply through the education system, but also then through what they were being taught. Yeah. And so what they did was they created an alternative space to say, you are people too, you have a history, our people have contributed to the story of the world and the knowledge of the world. And yeah, don't ever forget that, that's an important thing to hold on to. There's a quote from Akala, who is, I would argue, one of the most eloquent and well-spoken people in the whole of Britain, if not the whole of the world. And yeah, it just becomes very clear the kind of person that you can create out of an education system like that. Yeah, unapologetic polemic in the best possible way.

Absolutely. He's incredible. And I actually went down a bit of a rabbit hole into his work after reading your book because YouTube is a joy. Absolutely. Great music. Yeah, it's, it's just fascinating, isn't it? Because again and again, there's this like Benedict and Maslow thing. It's like, how does the cultural groundedness and the scientific inquiry, how do they sit together somehow? Maybe just to kind of come back to where we started, the thing that I really appreciate about even discovering the idea of the history of science as a discipline is that the history problematizes or doesn't necessarily problematize, hopefully problematizes the discipline itself. And by contextualizing it within a historical development. And I think for me, part of my insight that I've got from the book was the more we can do that historically rooting disciplines to understand where they have come from, they haven't come from nowhere, right? And they haven't always come from the nicest, most generative human places, right? Sometimes they come from pretty dark places. Places, as science does, but we, let's look at that. Let's understand that so that we can try and maybe do it differently.

Again, this is, this is a sign that I need to leave the house more. But again, this, I would pick you up on the use of the word dark there because— Yeah, fair point. —it's got so many negative connotations against. Just because it's dark doesn't mean it's bad. But I would agree with you on the point that sometimes our ideas come from bad places. So I'm just moved, I'm trying to move away from this from, from dark places.

No, no, I think that it's, it kind of demonstrates that it's everywhere, right? It's like the, the assumptions are everywhere. And even in, hopefully I would consider myself a relatively reflective person, it's everywhere because it's, I agree. It's like we talked about it recently, Nora Bateson talks about it as being like sticky honey. It's like, it's just, it's on everything and it's really hard. Yeah. It's really, it's basically impossible to, extract yourself from the stickiness of it, but just trying to be reflective. I don't know. And critical. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it's, it's, for me it's about strengthening my writing practice. It's like, well, what do I mean actually? Yeah. You know, what do, but you, you've absolutely nailed it in terms of, and this is the joy of the history of science. And this I think is one of my regrets because even like I have one of my very closest friends who I met in, in the first few days of being at university. She started out and she got through 2 years worth of a chemistry degree. Before she had the wherewithal and the good sense to realize that she wasn't interested in studying science, she was interested in studying history of science and science communication. And she swapped halfway through her degree to then complete a degree in UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies. And first of all, at school, didn't know the discipline existed. At university, it existed. I didn't have the wherewithal to swap. In my defense, I was studying archaeology, so possibly some of that was, was in there already. But I do kind of kick myself that I was so late to this brilliant discipline, which is the history of science.

Yeah. And maybe that's some of the hope in a more, I think, more interdisciplinary framings as things are becoming like, for example, the London Interdisciplinary School, I love as a new institution that's come up recently, trying to situate things around big questions or problems or whatever your framing is, but they're not necessarily disciplinary questions. Yeah. Yeah.

And this is, you know, before we started recording, We were both talking about, like, I personally need to be much more literate in genetics. I need to be much more cognizant and switched on as to, you know, what that science is. Because I find myself in conversations with people who do genetics for a living and the complexity of what they are talking about and what they are researching is completely beyond me, you know? And what's really annoying is sometimes I can hear, you know, that there's bad ideas to do with race still kind of stuck in their ways of thinking, particularly when it comes to ideas of population genetics. But yeah, here is the joy actually, is the onus is on those scientists to become much more cognizant about the history of where their ideas come from. And the onus is on us as non-scientists to be much more scientifically literate. Absolutely. And to understand the complexity of those ideas. Because once we all start talking to each other, the flaws will start to become obvious. Yeah. It should be no coincidence. So should be no, it should be no surprise that it is a woman like Ruth Benedict coming into the echelons of higher education in the United States to say, the eternal values themselves are suspect because of how much sexism was built into the academy at the time she was operating. Yeah. So then it should be no surprise that the more we mix these things up and the more voices that we get in and the better we can work across these very arbitrary divides of discipline, the things start to get better for everyone. Love it. Amazing.

Thank you. Yeah, I— well, I hope too, and that's the work, I think. So yeah, no, thank you. Such a pleasure to be able to talk through it with you. And yeah, thank you for the book. It's amazing. Totally recommend. Recommend people read it.

So thank you. Thank you.

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