Being Scientific Mode of Education at the verge of STS and Science Education

Collective pattern of thought acts as a resistance to the environment and inertia to social changes in Indian context. A Durkheimian scholar might explain that socioreligious thought and rituals enable the faithful to escape the limitations of their material conditions while a Mannheim might explain that it enable people to project their collective consciousness as the framework of policy decisions.  In both cases it is clear that individual embraces the thought process that is not of their making but the products of societal transactions. Individual, is instead of making their own destiny is the product of society. Are such organized resistance or what can be called primitive instinct is to be valorized or pathologized? Or, are they vocation in any sense of the term? According to Steve Fuller, Sociology of knowledge does not have one answer to such question and finds itself unable to answer. This point has been resurfaced in Peter & Luckmann The Social Construction of Reality (1967) which mixes the two traditions of question. Modern social sciences have tried to solve this puzzle using social actor theory. According to Vilfredo Pareto, rationality in itself is self-explanatory without succumbing to dualism of ends and mean. Such division of opinion is also seen in philosophy of science. Hans Reichenbach and Larry Lauden divided such question to fall between epistemology of knowledge and sociology of knowledge. However, both agree that science favors the rational side of the debate and there is little need of sociological treatment. Taking cue from STS, this paper explores whether science education help to answer such questions? As science claims to be a unified body of rational claims and rationality, as Robert Merton in discussed institutional imperatives of science in his book. However, this view has been challenged on the ground that these are ideology rather than pre-requisites of doing science, and the very fact science makes itself immune to criticism on the claim that scientists are only accountable for things that they do on research sites and they are not responsible for any sort of consequences both intended and unintended. This sort of arguments falls on the boundary line of STS and Science education to ponder questions like - Whom do we see as scientists? Do we see scientist as a person who on the one hand engage in hard core laboratory equipment, on the other hand exercise discretion that is antithesis to science like visiting temples, believing in horoscopes etc.? Are scientists prone to same kind of scrutiny that we do engage with politicians? Do they have same binding to act in public life as doctors have through Hippocratic Oath? Or, such questions fall out of purview of domain of science merely reducing it to private realm? To answering such question one has to take in to account the character and nature of science in larger context of science in which it operates. Taking such empirical challenge into stride and also leaf from democratic claim within STS community this paper claims that there is need to unmasking the pretensions of elite scientists and break what Gaston Bachelard has called ‘epistemological ceiling’ to
transform individual from having mode of operating science to being mode of science. For this, paper critiquing the concept of science capital produces new theoretical schema called ‘science field’ and tests the sub-construct of it like ‘being of science’, ‘doing of science’ against other sub construct called ‘having science’ of selected what national children science council calls ‘young scientist’. Finally, it makes argument to inclusion of teaching of epistemic knowledge of science in science curriculum to call upon student to internalize self-reflexivity, critical consciousness and become scientifically literate by 'being of science' and not by mainly by 'having science'.