Science Education in the Post-Truth Era

We argue there is an urgent need for science education to respond to the societal phenomenon of "post-truth," to do much more in supporting students to understand how science constructs and reconstructs “truth.” This is not to abandon canonical content but to prioritize essential objectives. Students should develop a sense of how science arrives at and refines ideas; the messy complexity of the process; what sort of questions it can address; how it evolves and interacts with culture and community; how it can result in reliable knowledge and how it can go wrong. We draw examples from introductory physics laboratories.