Yes, you’ve completely nailed it. The stakes are in fact very high here. There exists a tradition of positivism in our science education, based upon very simplistic theories for how people learn that we’ve known have been wrong since Paulo Freire. Much of the activity in education reform today is centered around constructivism, which positions all human learning as the byproduct of some form of human engagement. We seem to have a bit of a dichotomy here between this culture of scientism and the education reformers. The scientismists appear to not even be aware that they are obstructing education reform. They imagine that the biggest threat to science is that of laypeople and pseudoscientists debating “bedrock science”. But in staking out that position, they have implicitly accepted that learning is the byproduct of one-way communication (“filling an empty vessel”). The problem here is that there is no way to get to critical thinking that does not involve two-way communication. You have to invite people to debate issues in science in order to create critical thinking in those people.
Since we cannot get to unification in physics without armies of people fluent in critical thinking, the only rational way forward is to encourage debate and focus upon giving people tools that make them better critical thinkers. Outsiders have always played an important role in scientific revolutions. The big questions in science will not be resolved by rejecting history; the real “winners” in science, in the long run, will be those people who can build systems which facilitate the most complex discourse between competing worldviews.
