The great educational divide

Bridging the gap between the sciences and the humanities by reworking global education systems may be necessary before measures to tackle global warming gain effective traction

“The Two Cultures” was the title of an essay written in the 1950s by C P Snow, the polymath novelist, civil servant and physicist. Snow described the deep divide between the sciences and the humanities in striking terms, and asserted this divide was a big handicap in creating policy to tackle real-world problems.

Snow said many highly educated people with humanities backgrounds would not be able to define “mass” or “acceleration”, or state the “Second Law of Thermodynamics” while he also bemoaned the inability of highly-trained scientists to identify famous quotes from Shakespeare.

The divide became really apparent to me personally during the Covid-19 pandemic. During that first brutal lockdown, a friend with an MA in history asked me to explain what “exponential growth” was, and how one could extrapolate the course of an epidemic, and suggest mitigating policy action.

I am not an epidemiologist. But the basic mathematics required is centuries old and taught at high-school. I walked my friend through the concept of doubling: Assume one infected person infects two persons, who in turn infect two each, and so on, to help him understand how quickly a disease may spread. Then I explained the basic concept of differential calculus and how it provides tools for calculating the rates at which such curves change their trends.

I also took him through some of the basic ideas of Bayesian conditional probability. Bayesian approaches start with an initial hypothesis and are then modified as more information becomes available. These ideas can be applied to calculate the size and composition of the random sampling required to arrive at reasonably accurate estimates of infection in a population. I also explained some related concepts like herd immunity, and estimating the frequency of infection in a given population.

The models epidemiologists use are obviously way more sophisticated. But the basic ideas are not so difficult to understand. At any rate, my friend, who is in his 60s and hasn’t ever studied probability, or calculus, seemed to get the underlying intuitions quickly enough. No, he wouldn’t have passed a high-school maths test on the back of my explanations. But understanding that it can be done gave him some confidence in the way projections were being made about the pandemic.

He reciprocated by pointing me in the direction of historical accounts of plagues and pandemics such as the 1918 flu, the European bubonic plague, 19th century cholera. This was information I would have struggled to find. I learnt something about the way in which large populations and their rulers respond to pandemics. As a result, I was braced for the second wave, and a third, and I was very grateful when the vaccines started to arrive.  

In a very simplistic way, this brought the Two Cultures debate home to me. Policymakers need some sense of both domains to make effective decisions in a pandemic; they need to know enough to trust the mathematical and statistical models epidemiologists use, and they need to know enough about historical patterns to understand what works when it comes to protecting large populations.

The divide is also a possible explanation for many other puzzling situations. Why did Betamax fail and VHS catch on when it came to videotapes? Betamax was superior in resolution quality. But VHS allowed for longer recording times per cassette and that meant more content at far lower prices.

It was a variation on the early 20th century theme. Publishers who sold trashy paperbacks (the so-called “penny dreadfuls”) thrived while those who produced beautifully printed, expensive leather-bound hardbacks went bankrupt. The engineers who created Betamax didn’t get this analogy.

The divide was clearly a stumbling block in pandemic management.  Anti-vaxxers refused to understand herd immunity; anti-maskers indulged in risky behaviour. Scientists and policymakers failed to convince large chunks of the population.

The divide is clearly a stumbling block when it comes to combatting anthropocentric climate change. Bridging that gap by reworking global education systems may be necessary before measures to tackle global warming gain effective traction.