This article argues that we need to abandon the word "biodiversity", to rediscover the biology that it obscures and to rethink how to introduce this biology to young people. We cannot go back to the systematics that once made up a large part of a biology A-level course (ages 16-18), so we need to find alternative ways of introducing the variety of life and whole-organism biology, and we need to embed it in an ecological and evolutionary context. If we fail to do this, biology will become largely a disjointed mosaic of human and molecular biology without the links that knit them together. When the curriculum is next revised, the biological community needs to be ready with a coherent vision and some new ideas. (Contains 4 figures and 1 note.)