Unlearning Modernity: Remaking Science Education in the Anthropocene

This comment argues that science education remains rooted in modernist assumptions of control, separability, and human exceptionalism, even as it is often framed as a response to the Anthropocene, despite emerging scientific fields increasingly emphasising relationality, uncertainty, and more-than-human forms of intelligence. Drawing on developments in areas such as holobiont biology, quantum science, and anticolonial research, the authors contend that this misalignment is structural, rooted in science education’s inheritance of a modernist framework that emerging science appears to be gradually abandoning, and that the boundaries of legitimate scientific knowledge must expand accordingly. They propose that collectively unlearning habits and mindsets no longer fit for purpose is essential to a fundamental shift from educating students primarily as problem-solvers for technological and economic progress toward cultivating participants in knowledge generation, world-building, and the shared stewardship of planetary futures.