Book Review: Why we Teach Science (and Why we Should)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25321/prise.2024.1487Abstract
Why do we teach science in schools? There are many usual responses to this question. Because scientific knowledge is useful for everyday life; because the developed reasoning skills are also useful in everyday life; because future citizens will need to be able to make decisions about important socio-scientific issues, and thus require both knowledge and reasoning skills from science, and so on. However, as John Rudolph brilliantly shows in his book Why we Teach Science (and Why we Should), the science education typically taught in US schools (and I would add almost everywhere else in the Western world) falls short from achieving these goals. Despite the declarations of policy makers on the importance of science for society and of curriculum developers on scientific literacy playing a major role in school education, public polls more often than not show that people lack both a solid understanding of science, and the trust in scientists, as became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Why is this the case?
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