Most Western nations struggle with providing effective, efficient education, but Britain has given up and decided to throw away any semblance of curricular standards in physics.

Wellington Grey wrote an open letter regarding a decline in seriousness on the GCSE, Britain’s certification exam for students ~14-16. He bemoans the invasion of purposeless content and questions, the proliferation of pseudoscience and the oddly political.

I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn’t cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with… something else, something nebulous and ill defined. I worry about this change. I worry about my pupils, I worry about the state of science education in this country, and I worry about the future physics teachers — if there will be any.

In short, he wants his subject back.

There is a teacher shortage in this country, but if a physicist asked my advice on becoming a teacher, I would have to say: don’t. Don’t unless you want to watch a subject you love dismantled.

I am a young and once-enthusiastic physics teacher. I despair at what I am forced to teach. I have potentially thirty years of lessons to give, but I didn’t sign up for this — and the business world still calls. There I won’t have to endure the pain of trying to animate a crippled subject. The rigors of physics have been torn down and replaced with impotent science media studies.

I beg of the government and the AQA board, please, give me back my subject and let me do my job.

He has petitioned the AQA, the body that administers the GCSEs, as well as making this letter public. The response has been overwhelming - we’ll see if the AQA, or anyone else for that matter, gives this subject the attention it deserves.

Check out his latest web-comic, a test that pokes a bit of fun at the new curriculum. The rub? Question #3 is real and taken directly from the AQA-approved textbook for GCSE-level physics:

3) Imagine a taxi firm uses an ambulance radio channel by mistake. Write a short story about a mix-up that happens when the taxi firm uses the ambulance radio channel.

If that’s British physics, I won’t expect to see the Queen’s own playing cricket on the moon in my lifetime. It does bode well, however, for disaffected Onion employees - you may have unwittingly prepared yourself for a future career in British education.

I wonder what this guy thinks about it.