It came to me in a dream last night to start a blog about education in the news. Lo and behold the first article I see on Salon today is about Why America is Flunking Science. Science and math were my favorite subjects in school so my heart frowns whenever I see people reject the art and beauty of science.
This article doesn't actually talk about why we're failing science, as much as it elaborates on the culture around science and scientist. It argues on the one hand that movies and entertainment have boxed science into the realm of crazy villains and lonely nerds, and distorted it just enough that if someone by chance did want to be a crazy nerd, real science is much harder and more boring than it looked on the screen. On the other hand, we're not failing science--we're just cherry picking the science we want to trust, which most of the time is wrong.
I think that ideally, scientist and educators want to see science as a benevolent, neutral observer of nature. But in reality it is biased and controversial and used in morally ambiguous ways. Science has been manipulated for political and financial gain for centuries, and that also leads people to be suspicious. I think it's unfair to say it's up to the scientific community to dispel the myths and caricatures about science. It's up to all of us to open our eyes and level our heads. I think it would also help if teachers, even in introductory science courses, discussed the way science is applied to our life and our view of life and society. Students should be given the skills to come to unbiased conclusions and recognize biased uses of science. Just my 2 cents...
Bear with me. It's my first blog.
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I think this is a very interesting subject that you touched. People are not as aware as they really should be about how important science is in our society and how we are surrounded by science and that science is not the opposite of religion but that it can go hand in hand with it. I know I am about to touch a whole new subject right there, but it is shocking to me to see how many people don't know nothing about it and even more shocking to see how many people have a problem with science, giving it a bad, no and evil rap. Let me put it this way: You can say that a gun is evil because it was created to harm, to kill. That is the purpose of it. It was not created to collect water in it (like a cup) or to cut vegetables or meat with it (like a knife). It was created to shoot bullets that kill or harm at least (which is evil, even if you harm or kill a criminal). Well, science (which was not invented but resulted of logical thinking by applying the rules and laws of physics and chemistry) can have many purposes, good and evil. It depends on the motivation of the person applying it. It's nature is not evil and whenever I hear people demonizing science I have to think about how the church was demonizing astrology in the dark ages and I think to myself: Where do we bread stupidity and ignorance on such an intolerable scale that it throws us back into the dark ages where the educated had to fear for their lives, and what's next? Are they gonna start to burn books? The relationship that people have these days with science is a terrifying reflection of a society that refuses to think for itself and that rejects logic and wants magic instead.
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