Scientific Literacy

September 24, 2007 in General Info, Media

Seed magazine recently held an essay contest on the topic of scientific literacy. You should read the winning entries.

From the winner:

Students must be convinced that changing one’s mind in light of the evidence is not weakness: Changing one’s mind is the essence of intellectual growth. By forcing students into evidence-based debates with one another, this mode of interaction, like any other, can become habitual. After being consistently challenged by their peers, most students eventually see that attempts to free themselves from facts are a hollow, and fundamentally precarious, form of “freedom.”

And from the taker of second place:

Understanding that our scientific knowledge is “only” a model is the key to true scientific literacy.
Scientific literacy requires an understanding that science is only a model. We have to be able to jettison our models when our critical thinking leads us to that conclusion.