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Recent proposals to introduce new teenage examinations that would abolish A-levels were attacked today by Lord May, President of the Royal Society. In particular, the Tomlinson proposals lacked any explicit commitment to science teaching, which Lord May argues should be continued up to age 19, as a way of ensuring students emerge from school with an understanding of the scientific method, and the very specific approach to problem solving that it engenders.

There can be absolutely no argument with that, and yet it is astonishing, given our aging society’s increasing dependence on the generation of school age children who will be affected by these changes, that there has not been more such qualitative discussion of these proposals, rather than the predictable discussion about standards and what it will mean for employers and universities in terms of recruitment.

To tie it into another running theme here, the debate on gambling has been equally sterile, even though the Economist argues (wrongly) that the government has been attacked on all sides. I have not seen it argued that an extension of gambling opportunities may produce a more general weakening of the understanding of risk and reward, which is essential to the prudent financial education other pundits have been advocating.

The speculative fervour that has accompanied the financial markets and now the housing market in recent years may have some of its origins in the spread of lotteries and gambling opportunities as Yale Professor Robert Shiller argues in Irrational Exuberance.

Perhaps the two could be brought back together by hypothecating a tax on gambling to fund the kind of education Lord May envisages. Specifically, if risk is to be better understood, no child should leave education without some significant knowledge of statistics and probability. As the science of probability was invented to better understand gambling odds, there could be no neater proposal.

Perhaps the casinos themselves could sponsor such educational initiatives now that they employ such academics themselves. Ed Thorp, author of Beat the Dealer, who was banned from Vegas after devising the first blackjack card counting system in the ’50s, suggested last year at the annual Wilmott quantitative finance conference that the casinos lost a lot of money in the late ’60s by banning card counters and changing the rules after he published his system. They were slow to reason first: that they should employ mathematicians themselves to understand their own risks, and second: that they would drive people from the tables by making themselves look defensive, rapacious and unfair. Thorp argues that very few punters were likely to have sufficient discipline to learn his system and win consistently. He argues that the idea that you could beat the dealer would have attracted more hapless hopefuls, so the casinos really had little to fear from him and perhaps more to gain.

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