The modern world does not exist without science and technology, but science does not rule the world. In a democracy — especially a democracy governed by the First Amendment — a healthy debate on all these issues will reach virtually every American institution, including the public schools. School boards and legislatures are answerable to the people — not to a regime of scientists.
Science is a cultural product that inevitably reflects the society it serves. This can be as breathtakingly impressive as the NASA missions to the moon, or as morally reprehensible as the Nazi medical experiments. Modern cultures cannot exist without modern science, but science is not the non-ideological and non-political world of knowledge many presume it to be. That presumption, to borrow Charles Haynes’ words, is “both wrong and dangerous.”
(Read it all)
No comments:
Post a Comment