|
As much as I'd love to chuckle along with you, I'm afraid defending the scientific method has become a serious matter - again.
Remember how smug we felt when taught about the end of the dark and superstitious age? How science shone a light and drove away the cult of ignorance? Well, brace yourself - ignorance, superstition and pseudo-science are coming around to haunt us again.
Those with a vested interest in keeping the public ignorant and confused will stop at nothing to paint science and scientists as a cult of crazed and unethical, even unscrupulous elitists who are out to manipulate the public into ungodly, selfish and frivolous beliefs.
There is nothing more important for science education than to impart the scientific method on young people - observation, model, hypothesis, experiment, lather, rinse, repeat. This is far more significant than teaching the atomic weights of elements or any similarly profound facts.
I'm worried sick about the education of our kids right now, and I can only hope that clear, free and sceptical thinking will eventually prevail over religion, occultism and superstition.
A dialectic view of history implies that dark ages keep taking turns with periods of enlightenment, but there is nothing that says we have to go down without a fight.
Cheers
Steffen.
|