2025 Volume 40 Issue 1 Pages 51-56
School science education poses potential risk of cognitively and culturally distorting children’s perspectives and ways of thinking on a large scale. The Fukushima nuclear accident revealed that experts do not always possess sufficient scientific literacy to meet societal expectations. From the perspective of civilian control of science and technology, the author utilized fire science to examine the Earth’s heat balance, identified flaws in climate models used for climate change countermeasures, and argued that learning overly simplistic models used for social consensus building in science classes hinders the development of children’s scientific literacy. Within science education content, microscopic phenomena at the atomic and molecular levels are considered effective in developing the ability to critically evaluate empirical scientific knowledge used in consensus building, and stepwise refinement of the overly simplistic greenhouse model was conducted. This paper introduces the results of these studies and proposes an earth science education that accounts for human-generated heat release during the Anthropocene.
