These days the vaccine theme occupies a large part of the news and social networks, ranging from delays, vaccination strategies, but everything this debate has also highlighted how a large slice of the population no longer trusts science. The cultural climate has changed for some time: there has been a mistrust and a growing irritation towards science, experienced by many as arid, too rigorous, cynical. And on the other hand, a fideism towards a science that I call “romantic”, based on a knowledge that does not need proof of efficacy and that above all knows how to enhance its uniqueness. Science, on the other hand, has rules, methods of investigation that respond to universal and rigid canons and which are, moreover, extremely democratic: transparent, pluralistic, shared and progressive (I invite everyone to listen to the beautiful speech in Propagandalive by Alessia Ciarrocchi). In reality, it is we who are undemocratic: we, who need, in a climate of individualism so widespread today, to feel unique, different from all the others and prefer to invent a “personal” one, even if it has no proof of efficacy. After all, we have been witnessing generations raised in an individualistic, uncritical model for several years. In the education of children the presuppositions of scientific thought have often been lacking: we have not cultivated enough curiosity, attention to differences, questioning one’s beliefs, not being satisfied with the most superficial truths. The enormous access to knowledge offered by the Internet did not give birth to a new Enlightenment, but a narcissistic, uninformed and self-centered egalitarianism. Horoscopes, esotericisms, crystal therapy, Bach flowers proliferate: a return to the past, to an empirical and magical science that does not require skills, tests, verifications. It is the clearance of ignorance, of shortcuts, of the result obtained without effort. A widespread, transversal sentiment that has made competence odious: the experts have failed, the specialists are not reliable, the professors, now experienced as arrogant holders of knowledge, must be challenged. Those who invoke complexity today are viewed with distrust, they are considered pedantic, boring. And the “non-experts” are dominating the scenes of the media, politics, pseudo-science, giving us their inconsistent knowledge. Scientists too have made mistakes and have their own responsibilities: the variability, the nuances, the doubts that in a congress between experts represent a wealth, brought to a television context turn into a destabilizing divergence of opinion, in which anyone can have their say. and no one is trustworthy anymore. And it has not been sufficiently reiterated that science is in a continuous evolution: things believed to be true in the past may no longer be true after new discoveries. This ability to question oneself and review old certainties that scientific research has, instead of being read as a guarantee of rigor, is often interpreted in a double-dealing way: «Yesterday they told us one thing, today they tell us another, tomorrow who knows what they invent!».
In this panorama of deniers and fake news, it is essential to reconstruct a different mentality in young people, which makes them less easy prey to manipulations. The contribution of the school, of all types and levels, is to undertake a “scientific literacy”, stimulating the growth of scientific thought and method. And we should do it from an early age: children are excellent “customers”, because they are naturally predisposed to absorb stimuli, it is enough to indulge their natural curiosity. But it is not a question of increasing the hours of scientific subjects (or at least not only) but what needs to be done urgently is there reconstruction of a method, an approach, a critical thought involving transversal scientific and humanistic studies and opening up to the world.
March 26, 2021 | 07:38
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