Science & Tech Quote by David Suzuki

Suzuki lands a quiet accusation inside a civics-sounding sentence: we built schooling systems that can recite science without inheriting its attitude. The line works because it flips the usual praise of “science education” into a charge of malpractice. Not ignorance of facts, but the absence of the one habit that keeps facts honest: skepticism.

His specific intent is corrective, even disciplinary. He’s not arguing for cynicism or contrarianism-for-its-own-sake; he’s calling for method over mythology. In Suzuki’s framing, the “most important lesson” isn’t the periodic table or climate models, but the mental reflex to ask, “How do we know?” That’s a direct jab at curricula that reward compliance, right answers, and credentialed certainty. Science, in the classroom version, becomes content to memorize rather than a process that constantly tries to break its own claims.

The subtext is cultural: societies that treat science as an authority figure rather than a practice end up oddly vulnerable to both technocracy and anti-intellectualism. If you’re taught that science equals “trust the experts,” you’ll either obey blindly or revolt when experts are wrong (as they inevitably are, in revisions large and small). Skepticism is the missing civic skill that lets people hold evidence and institutions to account without sliding into conspiracy.

Context matters. Suzuki, long associated with public communication around ecology and climate, is speaking into decades of politicized science and media ecosystems optimized for certainty. The line is less a lament than a warning: without skepticism, “science literacy” becomes another kind of faith, and faith is easily hijacked.