Science education imperative for the future

Before he passed away in 1996, leading American cosmologist Carl Sagan called for a virtual revamp of education. With the world being more and more influenced by dizzying technological advancement, he insisted during one of his last interviews that things would “blow up in our faces” if we let just a few befuddled politicians and self-serving interest groups decide scientific and technological directions. The proportion between the “speed” of technology and the “number” of people who can truly understand it wasn’t right, and this imbalance could threaten the world as a whole, he pointed out.

It was a visionary call from someone who didn’t even live to see the tipping point of smartphones, the birth and booming of social media and how jobs, plays and learning have been revolutionised or, in some cases, erased. But although his call was quite sensible, science teaching and learning have not been much different from his days. The unpromising situation is a lot more so in Thailand, where education as a whole, let alone the strenuous subjects of science and technology, has been woeful and dictated by bad politics.

Sagan simply feared what greed and ignorance could combine to unleash. How many politicians have sufficient scientific knowledge? It’s a question posed by Sagan who reminded everyone that they were the ones passing bills on, say, space research budgets or how far cloning experiments should go. Without enough knowledge, politicians would rely on the one thing they are good at, and that is rhetoric. As we all know, science and rhetoric can rarely be good companions.

Unless a lot more people are equipped to see through the rhetoric, politicians and business entrepreneurs will be solely responsible for the directions of world science and technology. Simply put, nobody will be able to really question the viability of a telecom concession that politicians in power give to a big corporate. That, however, may turn out to be the least of our concerns, because science and technology involve a lot more than radio signals.

How can we counter-balance the business-politics alliance that otherwise will control the paths of science and technology and possibly take the whole world near the brink with it? An overhaul of how the young generation learns things is the only way. People, according to Sagan, give science and technology more credit than they deserve when it comes to “difficulty”. If humans can understand the tax systems and stock markets, they should be able to grasp other complexities, he said. 

The situation, however, is hard to turn around in Thailand, where, if we look carefully, a few big problems stemmed from important know-how being in unscrupulous or greedy hands. That is compounded by the fact that politics has the biggest say on what Thai students should learn and how. We don’t have much hope when we look at the names of education, information technology or science ministers over the past few years.

Some critics think that Sagan’s call has an anti-religion undertone. Religions, after all, encourage people to have faith, meaning there are circumstances where curiosity should be put aside. Scientific learning, meanwhile, promotes analytical thinking and continuous doubts. When asked if religions would hamper a revolution of science and technology learning, he simply said science and technology need morality, too.

Thailand under a military government has set up a so-called education “super-board”. It’s supposed to give Thai education the real attention it deserves. Nothing has been said, though, about what Sagan believed all students in the world should learn a lot more.