Quoting from The Poor Man: He Sat Right Down And Wrote Himself A Letter:
[I]t is a waste of time to teach utterly uninterested schoolkids how to calculate reaction rates and trajectories of cannonballs and so on, things which are going to be about as useful to most of them in the grown-up world as being able to name all of the seven dwarfs, instead of teaching them A) what is science, B) what isn’t science, C) how to tell one from the other.
The result of this is that 99% of journalists, and the public at large, think that science is just one rather boring topic for “Crossfire”-style argumentation, where there’s one side screaming one set of lies and the other side screaming another and everyone hates America and/or babies and now here’s some ads for Matt Damon movies and dick pills.