Abstract
Lyn Carter. While science and science education might well be aware of their own methodological and epistemological preconditions, they are wilfully oblivious to their political, economic and social ones. Exposing the political economies shaping science education’s enactment not only explodes its mythical apolitical status but works towards re-envisioning a hopeful science education at a moment when humanity and the planet face converging and conflicting crises. As science education remains a liberal democratic project of the mid-twentieth century and early neoliberalism, this chapter charts a genealogy of liberalism’s and democracy’s embedded philosophical and political assumptions and contingencies, and their deterioration into the post liberal and post democratic futures. The genealogy focuses firstly, on the birth of Western liberalism during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment and secondly, on democracy on the in the 20th /21st centuries, and their shaping of science education. Post liberalism and post democracy with their increasing authoritarianism, platform capitalism and inequalities offer profound challenges to contemporary science education.
How did we end up in a world when a child should govern an old man an imbecile should lead a wise man and a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities? Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Second Discourse (1755, p. 137).
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Carter, L. (2023). Knowing Our Moment: (Neo)Liberalism, Democracy and Science (Education). In: Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice. Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39330-3_2
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