I think there’s a problem with the way science is taught. I think that the only important thing to teach in science class is the scientific method.
There is no fact that your average person cannot live without, and there’s no possible way to educate The Masses so that they have a working knowledge of any one field of science, much less all of them. But what they need to know is to know what science is, and how it works.
They need to know what uncertainties and error bars are. They need to know how peer review works. They need to know what a hypothesis, a theory, and a law are.
Now, I was taught all this stuff in school, even before I majored in a science in college, but I frequently run in to people who claim that they were never taught these things. More likely they were taught, but they didn’t pay enough attention, because it was not communicated to them that this stuff is vital, not just the boring stuff that you rush through in the first week of school, before plunging into experiments and field trips and dioramas and memorization of facts.
Teaching even a small fraction of the body of knowledge that science has accumulated is a Sisyphean task. Teaching how science works, however, is not only easily achievable, but necessary. People need critical thinking skills. They need know how to find reliable sources and look up the right answer if they don’t know it. They need to be able to tell science from pseudoscience.
Hear hear. I think you hit the nail on the head. School places too much emphasis on facts, and not enough emphasis on logic, reasoning, the scientific method, induction, critical thinking and reading, how to identify a real authority vs a wanna-be, etc.
Well as for why there is such a gap between science and “common knowledge” in the US I would blame the trend towards religious fundamentalism.
Think about it. For 12 years the schools teach some version of “science” distilled down to the proper reading level. Meanwhile the same students who are getting this uninspired version of “science” are hearing at home and in church and hey even in their state legislatures and the national press that Anthropology, Zoology, Paleontology, Geology, Astronomy, Physics, Archeology, etc. are all a bunch of lies sent by Satan to lead them away from the truth.
With the watered down science that most kids get in school is it any wonder that they pay more attention to the people leaping about and shouting about “creationism” and “young earth theory”?
The same parents who are telling their children that science is a lie are the ones who are blaming the schools and the teachers because Johnny can’t pass a standardized science test. What do they expect?
Anyway that’s where I would look. I’ve seen reports comparing Europe and the US as regards science competence among highschoolers and the only thing I can see to account for the differences is the trend in the US to, especially Christian, fundamentalism.
However, I would suggest that there are more or less critical bits of information that most adults should know at least in rough general terms. Basic principles of ecology and the second law of thermodynamics might be two examples.
I like the following quote from philosopher Jean Beaudrillard which seems to sum up at least some of the ideas expressed in this thread.
“We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.”