The "authors" are funded by the biotech industry to produce material for schools, eg their Prakash edited guide to agbiotech which is headed for Scottish schools. For more on this see:
http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Propaganda.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/GE/GE2/Biotech-And-You-Scotland.htm
Here they advise industry to take its educational "programme" still further:
"The authors suggest that industry leaders could direct some of their lobbying efforts to the public education arena. They could pressure state departments of education to update their science curriculum standards with relevant biotechnology material. They could serve on science advisory boards to incorporate up-to-date biotechnology concepts into standardized testing from the earliest grades. If biotechnology were a firm curriculum requirement, curriculum developers would rise to the challenge. To ensure that curriculum is high quality and relevant to real-life issues, industry leaders could serve as curriculum advisors. Most straightforwardly, biotechnology companies could sponsor programs for television and radio that provide a balanced look at the risks and benefits of a technology."
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BACK TO SCHOOL
October 2001
Nature Biotechnology, Vol 19 No 10 pp?911-912
Cathryn M. Delude , Kenneth W. Mirvis & Jeff Davidson
http://www.TheWritingCo.com [via Agnet]
The authors write that the US public's lack of understanding of science, and biotechnology in particular, remains a chronic problem. As authors and publishers of Your World, a magazine specifically tailored to middle-school students that provides information on biotechnology research, the authors writes that they are struck by the popularity of, and demand for, high-quality educational information on recombinant technologies. At the same time, they are staggered by the remarkable scarcity of resources devoted to biotechnology education. What can be done to improve this situation?
For most US students, the main (and usually last) opportunity to acquire knowledge about science comes in high school. Unfortunately, such classes often fail to provide even the bare minimum of information about biotechnology. Many schools have difficulty recruiting and retaining good science teachers. Those teachers that are available either have trouble keeping current with cutting-edge technologies during their limited professional development days or encounter difficulty translating new breakthroughs into classroom investigations. Most textbooks for biology and advanced biology fail to include information on the radical new biotechnological discoveries. To make matters worse, most high-school students take biology only in the 9th or 10th grade, many fewer take advanced biology in their senior year, and a large number of college students graduate without taking any biotechnology-related courses whatsoever. In simple terms, the majority of current US graduates are as out of touch with biotechnology as their parents.
Worse still, the authors state, education policies in certain states have exacerbated the problem either by giving biotechnology short shrift in educational frameworks and standardized testing or by making coursework impenetrably pedantic and opaque. While most states provide some information on basic genetics and DNA technology, the teaching of new biotechnologies -- genomics, proteomics, stem cell research --is nowhere to be seen in curriculum standards.
The authors go on to say that once out of school, there are few opportunities for adults who do not work in the field to learn about biotechnology. As difficult as it is to keep the "captive audience" of the classroom informed, it is harder to educate adults whose school days predate the discoveries now at play in biotechnology. Many adults have difficulty defining a cell or describing where DNA and genes are in the body. They simply cannot meld reports on cancer research, a new flu drug, a debate about patenting genes, the uproar over cloning and GM crops, and a gene therapy death into a coherent picture that weighs the risks and benefits (if they are indeed paying attention to these stories at all). The authors suggest that industry leaders could direct some of their lobbying efforts to the public education arena. They could pressure state departments of education to update their science curriculum standards with relevant biotechnology material. They could serve on science advisory boards to incorporate up-to-date biotechnology concepts into standardized testing from the earliest grades. If biotechnology were a firm curriculum requirement, curriculum developers would rise to the challenge. To ensure that curriculum is high quality and relevant to real-life issues, industry leaders could serve as curriculum advisors. Most straightforwardly, biotechnology companies could sponsor programs for television and radio that provide a balanced look at the risks and benefits of a technology. A good example is the recent NOVA/Frontline episode on genetically modified foods that presented numerous opposing viewpoints and exposed the enormous complexity of the debate. Industry leaders also need to learn the lessons of risk communication: it is simply a fact of human nature that people fear the unknown, especially when it comes packaged in language they don't understand, seems "unnatural," and takes place outside of their control. Industry communicators must address this instinctual attitude before their public can begin to learn and understand.