The Social Contract with Science: Why Civic Engagement Must Shape the Curriculum

In her 1997 Presidential Address at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, Jane Lubchenko called for a “new social contract” for science: the “contract represents a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding.”

Writing 22 years later, she was gratified that so many scientists individually had embraced her call in their research, but added: “make no mistake, the culture of academia continues to impede progress….It is time for strategic, collective action to change the culture of academia and create the enabling conditions for science to serve society better.”

For two decades, NCSCE has affirmed the social contract between science education and society by insisting that science learning is not merely workforce preparation—it is preparation for civic life in a democracy. The SENCER models are what science education looks like when disciplinary content is grounded in a the pressing problems of the day and connected to the other factors, conditions, and bodies of knowledge that bear on it.

That vision has never been more urgent. Today, federal agencies are being gutted, scientists dismissed for publishing nonpartisan findings, and public health data removed from public access. What we are witnessing is not simply a political crisis—it is the deterioration of the shared norms of transparency, accountability, and regard for evidence that sustain both science and democracy.

And yet, our dominant model of science education has left citizens poorly equipped to recognize what is at stake. For at least fifty years, STEM education has been justified primarily in economic terms: strengthening global competitiveness, sustaining technological preeminence, expanding the workforce pipeline. This narrow focus on majors, graduate salaries, and “ROI,”–now codified as policy in some states– has progressively displaced what was once the explicit mission of American higher education from its founding: the cultivation of citizens capable of participating fully in a democratic society.

This is the problem SENCER has spent twenty years trying to address. SENCER—Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities—developed a set of course models grounded in the conviction that science is best taught through real, unresolved public problems. Climate change. Biomedical ethics. Food safety and security. Water quality, public health–These are not merely engaging topics; they are the kinds of complex, contested challenges that require citizens to distinguish expertise from opinion, evidence from rhetoric, and uncertainty from ignorance. They are also “wicked problems” that surface both the power and the limits of science and connect to other knowledge domains, including law, economics, history and politics. SENCER courses don’t just teach scientific content—they teach students how scientific knowledge is generated, validated, and contested, and how it intersects with law, policy, ethics, and human values.

This civic model of science education has a long intellectual history. John Dewey argued over a century ago that the “scientific habits of mind”—empirical reasoning, provisional judgment, organized skepticism—were identical to those required by a discerning democratic citizenry. The “scientific democrats” of the 1930s and ’40s, many of them working in explicit opposition to fascism, understood that the norms and values of science and those of democracy are not merely compatible but structurally aligned: both depend on freedom of inquiry, uncensored communication, and the broad distribution of knowledge. The American Association for the Advancement of Science made the same argument in 1990 in “The Liberal Art of Science,” calling for science education to be contextualized in “real world” issues, aligned with other disciplines and knowledge domains, and reframed as a humanistic and civic enterprise–in other words, taught as a liberal art.

SENCER put that argument into practice. Its course models demonstrate that students who study science through authentic civic problems develop more durable content knowledge —and greater civic awareness. They emerge understanding not just what scientists have found, but how that knowledge was reviewed and evaluated, and why it matters to our lives. They learn to read through rhetorical framings, assess claims, and grapple with genuine uncertainty—the very competencies democracy now desperately needs.

Recentering science education around civic aims will require structural and pedagogical change across five fronts: integrating scientific content with civic inquiry; making the norms and methods of science explicit; situating science historically and ethically; treating media literacy as a scientific competency; and designing assessments that evaluate evidence-based reasoning rather than factual recall. None of these recommendations are novel—they have been documented, researched and supported by reform initiatives for decades. What is new is the urgency, and the urgency demands far bolder academic leadership than we currently have. But even if institutions won’t lead, individual educators can. As Ada Palmer wrote in a recent essay for Chronicle of Higher Education:

“We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here.“

The dismantling of scientific institutions does not occur in isolation. It succeeds where citizens lack the conceptual frameworks to recognize what is being lost, and why it matters. An education system oriented primarily toward job training and economic competitiveness leaves this vulnerability unaddressed.

SENCER has always understood this. The social contract between scientific institutions and the public depends on an educated citizenry that can hold both science and government accountable and the classroom will be a key site of that education. That contract is currently under severe stress. Reclaiming the civic mission of science education is not ancillary reform. It is a democratic necessity.