A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post declared “U.S. universities have lost sight of their core task….It’s time for higher education to get back to educating the workforce of the future.” The piece identified training in a few STEM fields, including AI, “hyperscale” data technology, and “building the technical workforce” as the “core task” of higher education, one that will “meet the needs of a civilized future.” (Murray & Woo, 2026)
While the call for all of higher education to make a few areas of advanced technology its “core task” is extreme, there is some irony in the demand to “get back” to an agenda that has been STEM education’s dominant focus for at least fifty years. (Berman, 2011; Rudolph, 2014) This narrow emphasis on employment, and even salaries, is now official policy in some states (Osborn, 2026) undermining what had been the mission of science education, and indeed all of American higher education, from the founding of the republic: the education of citizens with the capacity to participate fully in a democratic society (Cohen, 1997: Jewett, 2003, 2012)
Yet science education has not always been so narrowly defined. There was a time when both the scientific and policy communities emphasized science education as an essential vehicle for preparing citizens for democratic agency. (Kennedy, 1952). By the 1970’s, however, the focus became workforce preparation and economic growth, and science education’s broader civic function—the cultivation of citizens capable of evaluating knowledge claims and participating fully in public life—receded from view. (Rudolph 2002, 2020)
Not surprisingly, the link between science education and democracy found its fullest expression in the 1930’s and 40’s, among educational leaders opposed to the rise of totalitarianism abroad and concerned about the rise of fascist sympathies in the U.S. (Hollinger, 1996). Many of these “scientific democrats” were influenced by John Dewey’s work on democracy and education, and his insistence that “scientific habits of mind” were identical to those needed by a discerning and engaged democratic citizenry. For Dewey, science and democracy were not merely compatible, but structurally aligned. Both depended on freedom of inquiry, uncensored communication, organized skepticism, and the broad distribution of knowledge. The habits cultivated by scientific inquiry—evidence-based reasoning, provisional judgment, and disciplined doubt—are also the habits required for democratic deliberation. (Merton, 1942)
Dismantling Science and Democracy
Today, according to global risk analysts, the real threat to a “civilized future” is not a lack of education in AI or data technology, but rising authoritarianism and the coordinated unraveling of both democracy and our scientific infrastructure—the two institutions that offer our best hope for surviving, if not stopping, the interconnected global catastrophes resulting from climate change, epidemics, and armed conflict. (Laurie Laybourn, 2026)
When US federal agencies are gutted, scientists are dismissed for publishing nonpartisan findings, research grants are terminated midstream, public health data are removed from public access, and the government itself disseminates misinformation, it represents the deterioration of norms—transparency, accountability, and regard for evidence—that sustain both science and democracy, and threatens and national as well as international, stability, health, and well-being. When democratic principles are violated and existing laws ignored, the institutional safeguards that once constrained such erosion—policies, government agencies, and congressional oversight—have been hollowed out fand made ineffectual. (Goldman, 2025; Malakoff, 2025)
In the immediate term, addressing the twin crises of science and democracy will demand robust resistance on all fronts, institutional and individual. But in the long term, higher education has a critical role to play in rebuilding both democracy and science through a deliberate strategy of pedagogical reform and the re-orientation of STEM education to civic purposes.
Conflicting Educational Visions
Knowledge and skills matter, and ensuring that students can understand and use emerging technologies is an important goal, but focusing curricula on specific employment sectors that may be short-lived, or may not even materialize, has serious risks in an era of accelerating innovation, and will not cultivate the capacities needed for long-term career adaptability in a volatile and uncertain future.
Unfortunatly, despite a century of calls for pedagogical reform, most STEM instruction is designed to meet the career needs of subset of students who are STEM majors, and emphasize mastery of discrete facts over methods and processes. As a consequence the graduates headed for non-STEM careers—other professionals, parents, future voters, jurors, and community members, encounter science education that emphasizes the regurgitation of knowledge that is unused, and soon forgotten, rather than a broader comprehension of how that body of knowledge connects to other knowledge and is deployed in the world. More importantly this approach does not produce an understanding of the institutional norms and practices that produce reliable knowledge in the first place—the kind of scientific understanding that supports civic agency and engagement. As John Dewey noted more than a century ago, “science teaching has suffered because science has been so frequently presented just as so much ready-made knowledge, so much subject-matter of fact and law, rather than as the effective method of inquiry into any subject-matter.” (Dewey,1910; Rudolph, 2020, Labov, 2022)
In 1945, Dewey warned that separating science from “liberal and humane interests” would deepen citizens’ inability to understand the real world they inhabit, which is increasingly shaped by scientific and technological development. A civic model, by contrast, embeds the facts of science in the broader context of those “liberal and humane interests” and addresses how and why scientific communities generate, validate, and revise knowledge. Its goal is not just familiarity with facts but the capacity to distinguish expertise from opinion, evidence from rhetoric, and uncertainty from ignorance. Trust in science is cultivated not through the passive reception of information but through an understanding of the social methods and processes that render that knowledge reliable. (Sagan, 201-218) Such a model also attends to how scientific knowledge is deployed—and contested—in public life, and the ethical stakes of that deployment for democracy (Kitcher, 2011, 12; Rudolph, 2020).
Reorienting Science Education—What will it Take?
Re-centering science education around civic aims will require long-deferred structural and pedagogical change, but we do not have to completely reinvent the wheel. There is a “usable past” that ranges from the early 20th century through the models and prescriptions of “scientific democrats” of the 30’s and 40’s, who understood the role that science played in fighting totalitarianism and preparing individuals navigate competing claims, evaluate expertise, and participate responsibly in shared decision-making. (Hollinger, 1996). Even in the second half of the 20th century, when national security and economic competitiveness dominated science education policy, cognitive scientists and reform advocates demonstrated that learning was improved when facts were embedded inpractical and social contexts, a model of learning that closely aligned with that espoused by Dewy and his successors. (Bruner, 1973; Bransford, 1999)
What would this look like in practice? First, scientific content will integrated with civic inquiry. Students should examine contemporary policy questions—climate adaptation, public health, biomedical ethics, data privacy—not to reach predetermined conclusions but to analyze how evidence informs decisions under conditions of uncertainty and competing values.
Second, science instruction will explicitly address the norms governing scientific research, such as transparency, objectivity, organized skepticism, and accountability, as well as its methods—empiricism, hypothesis testing and correction, and replicability. Trust in science, as well as the civic applications can only be achieved through an understanding of the process behind the findings. (Dewey, 1910)
Third, science will be situated historically and ethically. Case studies can demonstrate how scientific knowledge both shapes and is shaped by social institutions, revealing the reciprocal relationship between democratic norms.
Fourth, media literacy must be treated as a core scientific competency. In an information environment saturated with misinformation, some of it coming from official government sources, understanding peer review, evaluating statistical claims, and reading through rhetorical framings are skills central to civic participation.
Finally, assessment will move beyond measuring factual recall to evaluate students’ ability to reason with evidence, grapple with uncertainty, and apply evidence-based analysis to unscripted problems.
Reforms like these would build both our student’s workforce readiness and their civic capacity. All or some of these recommendations can be found in the numerous calls for STEM reform since 1980, and most of them were reiterated in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s project “The Liberal Art of Science” (1990) or in many of the STEM reform initiatives cited in Levers for change: An assessment of progress on changing STEM instruction (Laursen, 2019).
The Civic Imperative
The dismantling of scientific institutions does not occur in isolation. It succeeds where citizens lack the broader understandings and systemic frameworks to recognize the stakes. An education system oriented primarily toward job training and economic competitiveness leaves this vulnerability unaddressed.
In a society increasingly shaped by science and technology, democratic governance depends on widespread public understanding of the processes and values that produce reliable knowledge to guide their decision-making. Science and democracy share a common fate. Both require free inquiry and responsible empowered citizens capable of disciplined, evidence-based judgment. A system that treats STEM learning solely as workforce preparation, and not a foundational public resource, neglects this interdependence. Reclaiming the civic mission of science education is therefore not solely a matter of educational reform, but a democratic necessity.
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