The second edition of the seminar develops the discussions begun on December 1993, taking as its starting point the issues and goals highlighted by the Nobel Laureates who participated in the two-day debate.
The general framework remains that of the relationship between scientific progress, economic development and the emerging ethical issues associated with such change. The participants have been asked to reflect upon the intrinsic cultural value of science and on the need for the general public to play a more active role in setting the goals and ethical limits of research and its applications, with a view to overcoming conflict and strengthening international cooperation. This scenario can not ignore the strategic importance of education nor training and the impact of changes wrought by innovation in the world of production and work.
The Future of Science Education
Wednesday 7 December 1994
We live in a world which is characterized by change. The pace of change, in fact, is increasing so that what used to evolve over a period of 50 years now takes place in ten years. The driving engines for this spiralling change are science and science-based technology. The change has to do with longevity, with improved sanitation and health care, with communications, transportation and entertainment. Of course, not all these changes are positive, but they are a facet of our times and they influence economics, politics, modes of living and thinking. The world has become so entwined, continent with continent, region with region. The fate of nations is welded together into what is aptly named "the global village". As a world society, it seems clear that we have arrived at a point in our history when there must be a major increase in the capability of ordinary people to cope with the scientific and technological culture that is shaping their lives and the lives of their children. In a world in which illiteracy is the shame of societies in which it is found, science illiteracy is increasingly disastrous. And wherever it is measured, one finds science illiteracy rates of 90-95%. The quality of primary school science education is similarly abysmal and these conditions are common in developed and developing nations.

Our world is full of brilliant potentialities and menacing threats. The 500 year-old commitment to rationality and the advance of mankind is under attack by fundamentalist dogma, by excessive greed, fear, superstition, hatred and ignorance. We stand at a crucial juncture at the end of millennia: whether to apply our science with humanistic wisdom for the advance of mankind or to succumb to the base forces and epic tragedies that weave our history. The global village image raises the stakes enormously in this age-old conflict.

Education in the science tradition must take place on all fronts. We must begin in the earliest grades of schooling or even pre-schooling, but we must not overlook the need to reach the parents and citizens who oversee the schools. It is this wasteland of education that we must address. The great virtue of starting science education at the earliest grades is that the young child is born as a scientist - learning about the world and, by school age, full of questions that are the essence of science. It is here that we can build on an eagerness to learn.

Although nations differ in language, custom, culture and educational efforts, there seems to be a common experience that greatly enhanced science education is required and is difficult to infiltrate into elementary school. It is even more difficult to influence the thinking of the general public: the paradox of an ever increasing influence of science and technology and ever decreasing understanding by non-scientists is made even more puzzling by the substantial advances of cognition science - of understanding how children learn and how better to teach mathematics and science. The basic universality of science and mathematics education encourages the idea of international collaboration. Chicago can learn the tricks that educators in Nigeria and India have developed. The powerful tools of satellite TV transmission and other technologies can be organized. A battle plan can be drawn, replacing the tragic waste of the Cold War with a new, hopeful war on ignorance. We are fortunate to have a powerful tool to help us - television. Unfortunately, its potentialities are nowhere near being exploited to advance public understanding or to aid the teacher in the classroom. Efforts are under way, sponsored by international organizations, to gather data, set up communication links and prepare for a massive, world-wide effort to address these issues. This deserves wide support because it is only when we have an informed, literate citizenry that we can preserve democratic traditions and insure that science and technology are applied for the advance of mankind.


The resulting essay has been translated into Italian and published in the book Scienza e società. Dieci Nobel per il futuro. (Marsilio, Venezia 1995).