Are your children taught anything about fungi at school?

Fungi play an essential role in the environment, in human nutrition andhealth, and are indispensable model organisms in basic biological research.Mycology has never been as important as it is today and this is undoubtedlythe most exciting time to be studying the enormous diversity, functions androles of fungi.Knowing what you know about fungi, you will probably expect that anyeducational presentation of "biology" will include a balanced description ofprokaryotes (bacteria and archaea), eukaryotic protists and fungal, animal,and plant biology. After all, leave out any of these components and the storyof life on Earth is incomplete and defective. But when the children walkthrough the doors into school what they are taught depends on the developersof the school curriculum. In the United Kingdom, unfortunately, thedevelopers of the National Curriculum don't seem to know what wemycologists know about fungi. Indeed, they seem to be totally ignorant about"our" Kingdom of organisms. The situation is similar in Austria, where, withina framework of school autonomy, the individual Secondary Academic Schoolsmay modify their curricula and develop their own specific profiles. Theseschools should provide pupils with standard entry qualifications for university,but in biology, which is one of their core subjects, fungi are marginalized ortotally ignored. What is also alarming is that evidence suggests an inadequatemycological education at universities too. For example, try a quick search onthe internet for "fungi and yeasts" (and vice versa) and you will get more than120 000 hits, most of them from scientific institutions. Aren't yeasts fungi?