This article, Rebalancing the Nuclear Debate Through Education, tells us:
Better physics teaching with a particular emphasis on radioactivity and radiation science could improve public awareness through education of the environmental benefits and relative safety of nuclear power generation, according to leading Brazilian scientist Heldio Villar. He suggests that it might then be possible to have a less emotional debate about the future of the industry that will ultimately reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
This is true enough but I think there is a more fundamental failure of our modern educational systems. Before we can reason effectively using any sort of knowledge, before we can even take in any sort of knowledge as knowledge, we need to shape our minds so that we have the proper respect for what lies outside of us.
As I noted recently, Thomas Jefferson thought — rightly in my opinion — that a “perverse literacy” would lead to an “invincible ignorance.” This is to say that knowledge, even blunt and undeniable facts, will be either ignored or squeezed into a weird shape to protect our preferred view of reality. I’ve noted before how Christians can read St. Augustine’s City of God and miss his jokes about farting — they expect holiness and purity and light in a book by a saint, not hard-headed attitudes about embodied human nature. I could add that I’ve read even popular histories and found hints, but strong hints, that American leaders have committed major war-crimes or have purposefully squandered the lives of American soldiers, perhaps even preferring many American deaths to upset the American public and sucker them into stronger support for wars just or unjust. In a more scientific vein, we could point to the almost deliberate misreading by many wannabe Christians of, say, the writings of evolutionary biologists. Those practitioners of “perverse misreading” miss the dynamic nature of this field of science and take questioning, qualifications, and expressed uncertainties of many sorts as being evidence that biological evolution is a false theory.
It is hard to read difficult works in an intelligent way. How many can read Moby Dick and realize that Melville is presenting Captain Ahab as being a more self-aware and courageous American, that is, as a morally insane human being who is in rebellion against God, upset that God has put constraints upon us?
We need reading and thinking skills to be able to read or hear even the best of knowledge and to make it our knowledge, that is, knowledge to which we have responded and have made our own, made a part of our thinking processes.
I’d like to go even further, to point towards what might be called my overarching goal: We need to be able to see all humanly-accessible knowledge, including that of our own technology, as being part of a unified body of knowledge of God’s Creation. In my freely downloadable book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, I write about humanly accessible knowledge being of four kinds for practical reasons but being of only two kinds ultimately: knowledge of God acting freely as a Creator of a particular world and knowledge of God in His transcendence. We know God in His transcendence only so far as He reveals Himself.
Knowledge of Creation, physics as well as evolutionary biology and human history and literature and all other fields of knowledge, is knowledge of thoughts God manifested. By struggling to understand, as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out more than 700 years ago, we begin to shape ourselves as better images of God. We become children picking up sticks and pretending to do what our Father does as He goes about His work of creating and sustaining and telling the story which is this world.
Western Christians once had a story of this sort and then we learned much that told us that story had always been no better than plausible speculations, no more and no less than an attempt to explain each level of created being by way of a narrative which held all of those levels and each entity in those levels in place. We learned a lot of reasons why that narrative was defective and we learned the wrong lesson that such narratives aren’t possible. Such a narrative is possible and creating that narrative, however implausible it will prove to be to our descendants, is perhaps the most important part of building, or rebuilding, a civilization.
Somewhere, Wendell Berry, the poet and farmer, told us that if we find moral ways to make our livings, we’ll more or less automatically solve our ecological problems. That claim can be enlarged to cover many more sets of problems, but — as he knew well — we can’t find moral ways to make our livings, including moral ways to generate power, until we recover an understanding of Creation as such. And that will require a far greater effort than pushing a few technical words and diagrams into the heads of our children.