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12 Education in Science

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This chapter explores the inevitability of scientific and technological progress, the
public’s ambivalence toward science, and the crucial need for a well-informed
society to navigate emerging issues. It emphasises the importance of education
and responsible media in helping people understand and make decisions about
pressing global challenges like nuclear weapons and environmental concerns.

Whether we like it or not, the world we live in, has changed a great deal in the last

hundred years. And it is likely to change even more in the next hundred years. Some
people would like to stop these changes, and go back to what they see as a purer and

simpler age.

However, as history shows, the past was not that wonderful. It was not so bad for
a privileged minority, though even they had to do without modern medicine, and
childbirth was highly risky for women. But for the vast majority of the population, life

was nasty, brutish, and short.

Anyway, even if one wanted to, one could not put the clock back to an earlier age.
Knowledge and techniques cannot just be forgotten. Nor can one prevent further

advances in the future. One cannot stop enquiring minds from thinking about basic
science, whether or not they are paid for it. The only way to prevent further developments

would be a global totalitarian state that suppressed anything new. But human initiative
and ingenuity is such that even this would not succeed. All it would do, is slow down

the rate of change.

If we accept that we cannot prevent science and technology from changing our world,
we can at least try to ensure that the changes they make are in the right directions. In

a democratic society, this means that the public needs to have a basic understanding
of science, so that it can make informed decisions, and not leave them in the hands of

experts.

At the moment, the public has a rather ambivalent attitude towards science. It has
come to expect the steady increase in the standard of living that new developments

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