Thomas Kuhn and others have written at length on how scientists largely chug along

Thomas Kuhn, and others, have written at length on how scientists largely chug along in groups that share basic assumptions (paradigms) - the famous herds of independent minds.The proviso - and this is what makes science so powerful - is that the herd travel is not random, and by objective checks it works, getting to its targets effectively. Evidence that's contrary to herd beliefs has an irritating way of pushing itself up until it's acted upon. It's the art items that are different: emotionally moving perhaps, but simply the products of one person's or one group's made-up views. There's more to it than that though. Scientists until the late 19th century may have felt they were achieving complete truth, but after relativity and quantum mechanics so completely undercut their results, the more modest consensus now is simply that scientific results are just successive approximations to the truth. Recognising that there are neurotransmitters and other chemical floods in the brain is better than the 1920s view that it was all a bunch of telephone-like cabling, but there's no reason to think that view won't be superseded by even more accurate visions in the future. The question rather is about the fields themselves: how much truth can they convey? At first it seems obvious.

The science items are true, for e really does equal mc2, and brain cells, if you examine them, do leak neuro-transmitters from their tips. In any case, you can verify the facts directly: ballet dancers really do stand in a weird way, and the Independence Day soundtrack does have resonances of Elgar and Bruckner. We do not think about this in terms of race - too many Benetton ads have fuddled our heads - but our gradual acceptance that there will always be a sector of society who are resolutely underclass, resolutely unlike us, who are amoral, promiscuous, criminal, subcultural, has definite racial implications. As the Charles Murrays of this world (who insist on seeing a genetic link between race and intelligence) well know "We owe all our children ...

the best possible start in life," said Cheryl Gillan, the education minister. Fine words, but they will only get it if we believe that all of them actually deserve it Do we?. How true is everything you've learned in this course? I don't mean to suggest there's been a plot by the editors to make it all up. As a society we no longer seem to believe in equality of opportunity. Whether this is through the Nation of Islam's tried and tested definitions of manhood or the quasi-militaristic tone of separate schools, street culture itself has already become one vast exercise in displaying in its bruised and battered form the brand of distorted machismo that schools find so disruptive.To be reminded almost innocently that our schools should give everyone who goes to them a decent education is to be reminded of a collective failure - a failure of will as well as of funds.