Science education against the rise of fascist and authoritarian movements: towards the development of a pedagogy for democracy

We teach and learn science not only for the sake of scientific knowledge and practice, but also for the sake of building a better world for everyone. Science education needs to create an alternative curriculum that will engage the youth in some sort of ethics and social responsibility activism: a curriculum for “people who will fight for what is right, good and just; people who will work to re-fashion society along more socially-just lines; people who will work vigorously in the best interests of the biosphere” (Hodson 2003, p. 645).

In addition, we should recognise that there is a destructive historical alignment between the work of ‘apolitical’ scientists and fascist/authoritarian regimes’ ideologies. Scientists were persuaded and succumbed to feelings of hatred disseminated by fascist propaganda (Renneberg and Walker 1994). Fascist regimes have threated free academic work and scientists who rejected authoritarianism. Science development during Germany’s Nazi regime was severely reduced due to poor administration, reduced funding, hostility towards scientists and an exodus of high-ranking Jews scientists (Deichmann and Muller-Hill 1994).

Similar behaviour is observed in twenty-first-century governments. Trump has denied the scientific community by accusing “climate change scientists of having a political agenda”, saying he was unconvinced that humans were responsible for the Earth’s rising temperatures (BBC 2018b). And Bolsonaro has shown “strong support for development in the Amazon” which has nearly doubled the rate of deforestation (The Guardian 2019). More recently, Scientific American has called Bolsonaro a “Populist President” who has sparked an “Unprecedented Crisis for Brazilian Science” (Tollefson 2019). Bolsonaro has questioned the work of Brazilian scientists, debilitating institutions and cutting research funding (ibid), similar to what happen to scientists in Portugal during the salazarist regime (Galamba 2013). Science is a social, cultural and political activity—it is not a value-free, purely rationalistic activity—so that scientists can and will make decisions and build arguments taking into account their political views, worldviews and emotions which may backlash or embrace fascist-like politics such as the examples above.

We are considering here a science education that is also concerned with its technological and social implications. Looking more broadly at STEM education, educators should also be concerned about the threat to democracy caused by the use of technology to undermine democratic structures. For instance, it was widely reported that analytics firm Cambridge Analytica harvested 50 million Facebook profiles and used algorithms to predict and influence how people should vote in the Brexit and the last US presidential election (The Guardian 2018c). Cambridge Analytica favoured populist nationalist candidates, using a “psychographic-profiling method (…) to develop unique voter-targeting models”, raising serious concerns about the trustfulness of the democratic rite in countries affected (Persily 2017, p. 66). Here, as in the past, there are STEM-related professionals contributing to a process which appears to be a direct stab at democracy. And yet, countries concerned with international competition have been investing in the teaching of ‘hard STEM’ subjects in the hope of prospering economically (Mansfield and Reiss 2020). Of course, we agree countries need competent STEM professionals. But if we are to challenge fascism-related views, we must take into consideration the relationship between the development of science, technology and politics, creating a state of mind in students that fosters emotional development such as inclusion, tolerance, collaboration, empathy—aiming for the common good. In order to achieve this and counter authoritarianism and neo-liberalism, science education should include discussions about ideology and subjectivity (Bazzul 2012).

Racism (Morning 2008) and, more broadly, fascism (Jenkins 2006) has been science education’s business for at least a century, but educational initiatives to counter fascist ideology have been short-lived. We know that articulating a teaching practice that clearly raises students’ awareness of the threats of fascist ideologies is not an easy task. For instance, in the USA during the interwar period, educators sought to combat fascist indoctrination by teaching students to identify traits of fascist propaganda such as name-calling and glittering generalities (Fallace 2017). But feedback from teachers about students’ critical thinking did not suggest this was a promising approach. It was recognised that there was a “need for a more comprehensive approach to critical thinking, beyond “a study of ‘tricks’ of the propagandist” (Fallace 2017, p. 50). In the meantime, in the UK, the motivations to develop political understanding in science education in the 1930s included a broader political agenda of combating the rise of Nazism, Fascism and Bolshevism (Jenkins 2004, 2006). The Association for Education in Citizenship argued that biology could be a vehicle to mitigate health and social problems. But its recommendations were rather vague. Members of the Science Masters’ Association indicated students should “acquire a sense of fact and a sense of law”, whilst “Marxist” educators advocated “relevance to personal and social needs” (Jenkins 2006, p. 200). After WWII, citizenship education within science lost motivation to supporting democracy against authoritarian views. Rather, it sought to making science more relevant to everyday life through programmes such as Science Technology and Society (ibid.). Today, because of fears that political bias would ‘indoctrinate’ students to think in certain ways and thus threaten freedom of thought, countries like Australia, the Netherlands and the UK have done little to promote political education in schools (Hahn 1999). To circumnavigate criticism, and to bypass its complex political system, political education in the UK takes place in citizenship education, a subject commonly taught separately from core subjects such as English, Science and Maths (Perry 2018). The isolation of citizenship education reinforces the idea that subject learning is non-political.

In the light of the above, as we will elaborate in this article, students need to be supported to reflect about those values in social contexts as a way to critically humanise science. Or science could be used again and again as an element of power that leads to bigotry and possibly to human obliteration.

We seek to show that the widely made argument that a scientifically literate person is able to think ‘critically’ in a democratic society presents limited contribution to political thinking and engagement. It also presents very limited contribution to developing interpersonal skills or raising historical awareness of the relationship between science and authoritarianism, thus not building a critical mind about fascism-related views.

The concept of scientific literacy that we take in our study encompasses knowledge and skills somewhat related to four strands: (a) the understanding and use of scientific facts and concepts in a content-orientated approach; (b) the learning of how to ‘do science’, i.e. learn about its methods, how to measure, collect and present data, and build evidence-based arguments through a process-approach (Millar and Driver 1987); (c) the learning of the applications of science and its relationship with technology and society through a Science, Technology and Society (STS) approach (Mansour 2009); and (d) the learning of what science is through a historical-philosophical-sociological (HPS) approach (Matthews 1994).

At least since the 1920s, depending on the political climate of the time, curricula across the world have sought to emulate key features of the humanities by introducing strands c and d of science literacy with a view to make it more meaningful to students’ everyday life, giving proper attention to human purposes and values, setting a ‘noble’ end for science education, and seeking to extend and enrich its purposes and objectives (Donnelly 2002, 2004). Thus, a humanised, useful and accessible science education would contribute to democracy, enabling all students and citizens to use scientific knowledge in their everyday affairs. After WWI and WWII educators, politicians and other stakeholders were shaken by the destructive power of military high-technology—developed and backed by prominent scientists across the world—and reassessed the general aims of education, in particular of science education. They concluded that science education should not only focus on the education of good professionals, but on the education of citizens who value democracy and peace (Jenkins 2006). However, despite attempts to humanise science, particularly through curricula that valued STS approaches, science education has aimed almost exclusively at enculturating youngsters in the forms of understanding and practices (strands a and b) valued and accepted by the scientific community (Jenkins 2004). The teaching of science for the sake only of scientific knowledge simply ignores social-political aspects of science (Hodson 1998, 2003).

Emblematic of the narrow contribution of scientific literacy to a tolerant and inclusive society, science education typically has clear neoliberal possessive individualistic aims that suit the economically privileged class, as deftly explained elsewhere (Bencze and Carter 2011; Bencze and Alsop 2009). In a nutshell, the focus on the teaching of the products of science (e.g. abstract laws and theories) serves the aims of ‘knowledge economies’, which, instead of valuing the production of physical things or attitudes and skills that benefit communities, value symbolic analytic services (jobs that require abstract thinking, manipulation of symbols, graphs, models, designing, creativity etc., with a view to serve the market and thus be employable). In this context of learning the abstract, science teaching is a “selection camp” of those who can do abstractions: “Relatively few students, mostly those from advantaged homes, seem able to more easily discover particular, pre-specified, abstractions from inquiries” (Bencze and Carter 2011, p. 652). The science curriculum, therefore, is suitable to the interests of the economic elite which seeks to keep its privileges of accessing the knowledge that will lead to the kinds of jobs that are of interest to them. Students are extrinsically motivated to learn science because they will possess the kind of knowledge that benefits the individual (themselves) professionally/economically, not the common good. This model does not question the established structures of power, marginalisation and oppression. It perpetuates them and requires an inspection of neo-liberalism and subjectivity to make visible alternatives (Bazzul 2012).

There are several examples in the literature and in government documents that fulfil the neoliberal possessive individualistic aims. For instance, it has been argued that students must be scientifically literate in order to gain a sense of empowerment, social agency and agency in the material world (Anderson 2007). By agency in the material world is meant someone who is able to use scientific knowledge and skills to understand, explain and predict phenomena in the surrounding world. Social agency refers to the marketisation of one’s knowledge and skills, on how useful science knowledge can help one to be absorbed by the job market and to progress professionally. In Anderson’s (2007) words, “Successful learners of science can gain respect for their knowledge, skills that enable them to do useful work, and access to jobs and to communities that would otherwise be closed to them” (p. 5).

In views such as those advocated by Anderson (2007), youngsters are taught to look for opportunities that build their educational portfolio that will place them in privileged social positions. Arguably, the selection camp model for science education is exclusive. It will implicitly force students from low socio-economic backgrounds to accept being educationally ‘defeated’ and placed in an unprivileged position in society (Freire 1970).

There is the argument that mainstream science literacy also promotes ‘critical thinking’ in everyday contexts—i.e. it looks for teaching strategies that encourage students to think for themselves, independently, based on evidence and logical reasoning, who would not be easily manipulated by charlatans and deceived by pseudo-sciences (AAAS 1993). Critical thinking has often been described as a form of rational, impartial, nonarbitrary thinking, based on evidence and on solid principles (Siegel 1980). And a scientifically literate person has been described as one who thinks critically when accessing scientific material in the media, such as newspaper and magazines, and can read graphs, tables and the like to make critical judgements and take informed decisions in everyday life (Hodson 2009). Critical thinking is believed to be essential to deal with problems students would encounter in their lives (Aikenhead 2006).

But, as pointed out by Margaret Mcnay (2000), this idealisation of scientific literacy will not question citizen’s views of what a fairer society looks like. This is because decision-making in everyday life is not a purely rational act, which implies that one equipped with scientific knowledge will not necessarily think politically towards a fairer society (Burbules and Berk 1999). Decisions about science often involve social and emotional aspects. The science literacy movement tends to downplay the politicisation of science and largely hides the fact that decisions about science are often made largely on social and emotional factors.

In fact, in the last century, science teaching that is circumscribed by the products and processes of science has not challenged fascist ideologies—partly because science has been seen as an objective rational enterprise devoid of a social and emotional context. During the salazarist regime in Portugal (1934–1974) scientific pedagogies that promoted questioning, inquiring, and wondering about the natural world (but excluding the socio-political world) were not seen as a political threat by the regime (Galamba 2013). Conversely, educators who worked for the emancipation of the poor by helping them to question the social structures of fascism, were targeted by the salazarist regime (Galamba 2013). As Carlos Tabernero, Jimenez-Lucena, and Molero-Mesa (2012) suggest, what matters for fascist regimes is the way that knowledge is ‘managed’ and disseminated. They have shown how overtly different science knowledge was circulated when conducted by libertarian movements in Spain (e.g. anarchist trade unions) and by the Spanish fascist government, and how this affected the “inclusion–exclusion dynamic”—the previously used “strategy of questioning the social, political and cultural establishment” (p. 70).

Turning now to STS (strand c), the American National Science Teacher Association (NSTA) refers to informed citizenship and critical decisions that should be addressed in school science in the following way:

Basic to STS efforts is the production of an informed citizenry capable of making crucial decisions about current problems and taking personal actions as a result of these decisions. STS means focusing upon current issues and attempts at their resolution as the best way of preparing people for current and future citizenship roles. This means identifying local, regional, national and international problems with students; planning for individual and group activities which address them; and moving to actions designed to resolve the issues investigated. Students are involved in the total process; they are not recipients of whatever a pre-determined curriculum or the teacher dictates. There are no concepts and/or processes unique to STS (cited by David Ost and Robert Yager. 1993, p. 282, our emphasis)

The description above supports the view that students should be active learners who think about problems that affect their local and global communities. Juan Garibay (2015) has shown how directions from NSTA and other guidelines do include a certain “understanding of society” but explains “there is no explicit mention of developing students’ understanding of inequalities or interest in rectifying structural inequities” (p. 4). This stance does not envisage, or does not make explicit, power-relations and structural forms of oppressions—NSTA seem concerned with the betterment of general wellbeing and the adverse impact of technology in a sustainable planet, but do not envisage the inclusion of traditionally excluded people from power and decision making (Calabrese Barton, Ermer, Burkett, and Osborne 2003). Moreover, in STS an uncomfortable absence of addressing emotions that lead to bigotry, intolerance and hatred—that we relate to fascism—remains.

Much of the response to combat the rise of fascism can be found in the history and philosophy of science literature and in a range of constructs made within the critical pedagogy field. The next sections will turn to them.

Studies on the nature of science (NOS) or, more broadly speaking, on history, philosophy and sociology of science (HPS) in science education have also ignored the historical relationship between scientists and fascist regimes. By asking the question “Does science education need the history of science?”, Graeme Gooday, Lynch, Wilson, and Barsky (2008) make an eloquent case for why the history of science should be taught in schools. They argue that the greatest benefits for students to study HPS are to gain skills such as the ability to “read and interpret primary sources”, “develop confidence in critical thinking”, “learn to formulate, marshal, and defend a cogent argument” (p. 325). These skills are advocated in the context of learning about the human struggle to develop scientific knowledge. To be more specific, students can learn about the life and work of people like Faraday, Darwin and Marie Curie, i.e. “about the life and work that led to the creation of the canon”, “they can learn about the provenance of standard techniques by way of historical study of their origins, the vivid familiarity thereby attained thus at the very least making it easier to remember what might otherwise be dull facts” and “can become acquainted with the key institutions, formative episodes, and accomplishments of their fields” (p. 326).

We do not deny the importance of learning the history of science in the terms put by Gooday and colleagues, which in fact is widely echoed by other science educations in the field of HPS (Erduran 2012). Nevertheless, the history of science will be incomplete if teachers and students ignore sociological and epistemological aspects of science such as the ideologically-driven agendas undermining of the work of some scientists, the power relations that authoritarian regimes have nurtured with science in the past, and the division of scientists who either supported or resisted fascism.

We should not ignore the reality that during the Nazi regime many scientists in Germany “fit[ted] unconditionally and smoothly into the Third Reich” and thereafter sought to develop an ‘Aryan’ science (Renneberg and Walker 1994, p. 16). Because of its allegedly political neutrality, scientists have been used as the instrument of fascist political systems (Siegmund-Shultze 1994). This has long been recognised: in August 1943, four years after the breakout of the Second World War, a number of scientists from different countries met in Birmingham to discuss how scientific work was treated under fascist and democratic regimes. In an article in Nature (Cliff 1943), they claimed hatred of mankind was a basic feature of fascism and that science can only flourish in a free society. G. Fournier, a French scientist present in the meeting, made a note that is particularly prescient in today’s rise of fascism:

Too many men of science had said: ‘I’m not interested in politics’. (…) It is his [sic] duty to see that they are used for the betterment of mankind and not for its destruction. In future he must continuously alert to ensure that fascism does not reappear under some other name elsewhere in the world. (Cliff 1943, p. 307, our italics)

There are claims that Hitler’s vision of the ideological role of war machine technology was taken up by groups of scientists and engineers who fought against the downfall of the Third Reich with intense activity in the strengthening of Nazi’s armament power (Albrecht 1994). Whilst some mathematicians sought to develop an ‘Aryan Mathematics’, others campaigned against and withdrew from German organisations led by the Nazi (Mehrtens 1994). These are only a few examples that belong to the fascinating, and yet dreadful and concerning, history of science and fascism, that has been intriguingly unappreciated and discouraged (Renneberg and Walker 1994). A fully-fledged HPS will not do without proper appreciation of the socio-political implications in the work of scientists in our recent history.

Clearly, being a good scientist is not necessarily conducive to being a good fellow citizen. This is because scientific universal principles and values such as those of freedom, truth and impartiality are not directly transferable to the social and interpersonal domains (Siegmund-Shultze 1994). Other historical accounts have shown how scientists have overlooked the social implications of their work and may have served, perhaps willingly, as vessels to fulfil the aims of destructive fascist regimes (Renneberg and Walker 1994). The apolitical aspect of the scientific enterprise is hazardous to democracies and plural societies which are based on mutual respect and for this reason it is urgent that science education should develop a socio-political agenda that undermines oppression of minorities and other fascism-related actions (Santos 2009). Authoritarian and fascist ideologies make use of dehumanised science, but they also dehumanise people.

The literature offers significant material to approach a history of science from a social-historical perspective with critical evaluation of the relationship between science and authoritarian regimes. This important part of history should not be ignored if we are to protect democracy from the modern emergence of fascism.

More than educating the individual to be critical consumers, critical pedagogy seeks to build a “much more politicised and issues-based science education” (Hodson 1998, p. 2). The literature in this field questions social and moral matters that have been developed in the literature under the overarching social-political action umbrella (Roth and Desautels 2002), which calls for a more democratic participation of the population on public affairs and therefore on the directions that science entrepreneurships can take (Roth and Lee 2002). This umbrella shifts the meaning of critical thinking towards social responsibility and accommodates views ranging from scientific colonisation (Aikenhead and Elliott 2010) and Freirean perspectives on science education to transforming the lives that youngsters lead to a culture of criticality and transformative agency (Santos 2009).

The roots of contemporary works in critical pedagogy can be traced back to the very influential works of Paulo Freire. Under the premise that education is always political, and is used to normalise and perpetuate structures of power, he developed a pedagogy to empower students to question and tackle social injustices through ‘dialectics’ and ‘praxis’. Those social injustices are related to class, ethnicity (Freire 1970), gender and race (Freire 1994). Since Freire’s Marxist pedagogy, there has been extensive development in the critical pedagogy literature that calls for democratic teaching, with a focus on social practice, that empowers and liberates students (Shor 1979) and to create ‘resistance’ (Jaramillo and Carreon 2014) against capitalist, white supremacist, sexist (McLaren 2010) and other forms of dominant and oppressive worldviews and social structures.

To give only a few examples in science education, Santos (2009), whilst criticising the STS approach which “corroborates an ideological model for the maintenance of the status quo”, has pledged “a political agenda to science education that would include issues such as unequal access to technology around the world, the domination power of technology, and the oppressive context of scientific and modern technological society” (p. 362). Angela Calabrese Barton and colleagues’ work has challenged the egalitarian aims of the ‘science for all’ movement (Calabrese Barton 1998) and advanced teaching approaches that aim at social action for poor/marginalised children (Calabrese Barton and Osborne 2002). She has also given new perspectives on the education of ‘urban children’ who live in a cross-cultural, multi-racial, high crime, polluted and socially discriminatory environment (Calabrese Barton and Tobin 2001). Calabrese Barton has developed approaches to address social justice in the classroom (Calabrese Barton, Ermer, Burkett, and Osborne 2003) that include connecting with the community and its views, finding out how pupils respond and feel about these interactions, and how to solve the problem. Part of Calabrese Barton and Edna Tan’s work is to give agency to pupils and to raise awareness of how certain groups of people can be ignored in political debates, and so to give them an awareness of the need for a ‘rightful presence’ in policymaking (Calabrese Barton and Tan 2020). Storage and colleagues have shown how the classroom discourse conveys to students that science is for men (Storage, Horne, Cimpian, and Leslie 2016) which puts women, in particular black women, off science. Rodrigues and Morrison (2019) argue for a socio-transformative approach to education that focuses on marginalised youth and builds on the foundations of diversity, equity and social justice in order to form transformative actions. Several others have scrutinised the economic-centred purpose of science education, as revealed in official documents and curricula (Garibay 2015), and proposed curricula that call for social responsibility by meeting the basic needs of the poor, the oppressed and marginalised. Marxist-humanist Paul McLaren has deftly criticised the relationship between science, education and the dominant interests through private investments (Calabrese Barton 2001). He has argued that science education emphasises profitability whilst overlooking that “The wealth of our nation should be measured by the elimination of class exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression” (p. 853). To counter the ‘death-dealing capitalism’, Bazzul and Tolbert (2019) have claimed we must “learn to extend our love beyond love of self or extensions of self” (p. 307). And studies in critical peace education (Bajaj 2015) pledge for the end of all forms of violence (physical, structural, and cultural) that may be brought about structurally or not, organised or not, particularly in conflict and post-conflict situations.

Mainstream science education will do very little to tackle fascist-related views if it ignores developments in critical pedagogy such as those above and continues to teach science for the sake of scientific knowledge only, detached from its sociohistorical connections to social injustices. This said, current developments on social justice focus mainly on the sociological level of transformation but curricula and teaching practice in Western societies still disconnect learners from love (Bazzul and Tolbert 2019), compassion, empathy, and other bonding feelings (Magee and Pherali 2019). The emotional and psychological level also needs to be brought into focus for a deeper change to occur, and in order to do this we now turn to look at Othering and social justice in order to show why the emotional level is so important.

We want to propose some initial thoughts on the connections between how science in schools conveys the nature of science, the form of society people want to build, and the role of the social and emotional development of pupils.

Using science in a dehumanised way is supported by having a view of science that is dehumanised. This is the rational model of science, where people are likely to accept science as a non-emotional activity. In this model, it seems probable that one would be less likely to question the directions taken by research as though it was insulated from politics and worldviews. Such a model of science is also more likely, stereotypically, to appeal to men because of the lack of emotional and social content (Wyer, Barbercheck, Cookmeyer, Ozturk, and Wayne 2008). On the other hand, if one accepts the socio-cultural model then science should be seen within its cultural context with all its political overtones (Parsons and Carlone 2013). The incorporation of logic, social and emotional aspects makes it more probable that it will appeal to all genders. This is a humanised view of science. Hence, it is important that pupils understand these skills within the social context of science, and that the curriculum should change to allow this, as for example in Canada (Bencze 2017), Europe (Levinson 2018) and England (SATIS 1988, 1990).

Further, therefore, students should learn to act in social situations, form networks with many people, including those who agree and those who do not. Increasingly, scientists need to work with people across diversity—gender, sexuality, ethnic backgrounds, religion and varying abilities (Cooke and Hilton 2015). In particular, they need to be able to understand, both intellectually and emotionally, those who work in the community. Both in science and in a society we are interdependent and need to develop a network of social relationships. The key is to enable students to understand this and see the interconnections between the two; in other words, develop a personal response to science (Head 1985): a scientific state of mind/identity that involves social and emotional reactions. Crucially, the state of mind—how one perceives knowledge, whether it is to be accepted or if its values are to be critically looked at in collaboration with diverse others—marks the contrast between authoritarian/fascist minds and those of a democratic citizen (Fallace 2017).

Fascism has a set of attitudes that dehumanise people through Othering and are therefore quite different to those required by democracies. There have been studies about attitudes and politics by Theodor Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sandford (1982) and William Kreml (1977) that have shown that worldviews that are suitable to fascism-like governments would be unlikely to support the kind of science education depicted above—one that develops students’ emotional skills (Humphrey, Kalambouka, Wigelsworth, Lendrum, Deighton, and Wolper 2011). As Adorno and Kreml have reported, in general, authoritarian people are often concerned with situating people into two groups, one weak and the other strong. Othering is one of the psychological bases that is involved in the labelling of groups in order to justify dominance. Authoritarians also tended to believe in ‘natural’ dominances of the “strong over the weak, smart over the dull, and the able over the incapable” (Kreml 1977, p. 52). Contact with those perceived as powerless can lead authoritarians to wish to dominate or humiliate them. When combined with a generalised hostility towards people who are different, it is easy to see that racism and sexism (and other -isms) are likely to be common outcomes. Similarly, women are often seen as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (Theodor Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sandford 1982). There can be an anxiety over sex, which can make relationships with the other sex pervaded with rigidity. In terms of broader relationships, Theodor Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sandford (1982) found that those people with authoritarian attitudes could form friendships based on what they could get from people, rather than on making relationships based on mutuality.

Later studies have also considered ‘Social Dominance Orientation’ (SDO) theory (Duckitt and Sibley 2009) in addition to ‘Right-Wing Authoritarianism’ (RWA) (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, and Malley 1994). Those with high SDO believe that there should be strong hierarchies, often in terms of factors such as gender and ‘race’. There are robust overlaps between RWA and SDO but with differences in social attitudes (Durieza and Van Hielb 2002). It has been found that those with a high SDO score negatively correlate with empathy, tolerance, communality, and altruism (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, and Malley 1994). As a result, authoritarian people can believe in power-based inequality including homophobia, misogyny and racism, which is dehumanising people by Othering them and not recognising their humanity. Othering is a significant part of prejudice and group-based inequalities.

A central point here is that there are many people who are not at the extremes discussed above who can still have a fear and anxiety over difference, which is why people who are sexist are often also racist and homophobic. Even people who recognise the importance of equity can argue for it at a political level and feel secure as it is emotionally distant, but the emotional level can evoke anxieties, which is why tackling the emotional level as well as the sociological is so essential. If people can come to terms with their anxieties and fears over difference, then difference can be seen as a resource and a source of joy. Tackling Othering is less about reducing difference than to generate understanding, to accept it and enjoy it with companionship, humour and creativity.

From these arguments about dominance, relationships and anti-diversity, we would contend that in order to counter authoritarianism/fascism requires it to be tackled at a social and emotional level which, with our aim to educate pupils, requires a change in classroom practice. Hence it becomes clear that if science education is to contribute to countering fascism and promote democracy, teachers should:

In light of the above we contend that science could be taught to make explicit the social context of its development. If it is not made explicit there is a danger that the view of science that it is only rational will be reinforced, which will not support open discussion with the students about such dangers to free and inclusive societies.

From this evidence science education has a responsibility to make explicit the links between science and politics and to humanise science as an activity, and recognise people in all their diversity.

While the science literacy movement has opened up the territory and produced some important approaches, we argue that it will benefit from encompassing the social, emotional and political undercurrents that both affect the development and use of science, which in an interwoven way, changes society. A programme to help safeguard an open-minded and tolerant democracy through science education is still waiting to be developed. Here, we offer an example of scientific pedagogy that could contribute to this aim. The science classroom would benefit from (1) having a model for students to humanise science and see it as a social activity, and (2) integrating this with students’ social and emotional development through combining social responsiveness with science education.