There are two lobbies concerning whether or not astronomy should be taught at school. The first lobby is emphatically for teaching astronomy in schools, the other is equally emphatically against. The second lobby will claim that the schools are not equipped to teach astronomy, it is not a qualification for any career and indeed it is somewhat beyond everyday experience. Adherents to this point of view argue that inadequate and poor teaching of astronomy at school is to do astronomy a disservice and therefore it is best not to begin. At first sight this looks like a good case. I well remember being taught astronomy at school. A hand-drawn set of constellation slides was projected on to the science laboratory wall and the class dutifully drew out each constellation afternoon after weary afternoon on the graph paper of their laboratory notebooks. Woe betide any of us who got our angles askew or our relative distances distorted. A clout on the head per constellation is not a good introduction to astronomy.
