Private Profit, Science, and Science Education: Critical Problems and Possibilities for Action

Abstract

Abstract Although governments, educators, and others have made significant efforts to promote education that would help students to develop more realistic conceptions of the nature of science, there continue to be difficulties in that regard. Fields of professional science often are represented in school science as isolated from fields of technology and from societies. Such a view may assist scientists in relatively freely pursuing topics of interest to them, using methods common to their communities, and sharing their findings and conclusions with colleagues. In this view, it would be left to engineers, politicians, and others to determine appropriate uses of products of the sciences. In practice, fields of science seemed to have—to a great extent—held close interactions with fields of technology and with societies. An aspect of such relationships that has had very little attention in school science is the nature of associations between fields of business and science. In this article, analyses of the nat...