Better to keep the masses uniformed. Less competition with the Church. I remember how the Church was opposed to letting the masses have a printing press. Something about knowledge and power ...
Exactly the opposite. If you'd read the rest of the post you'd see that my problem with low level science classes is that functionally they do worse than keep the masses uninformed, they downright MISinform the masses. 90% (maybe even more) of what you learned in your jr high and high school science classes is complete rubbish, it doesn't match up with either known or theorized science. This thread is a classic example, most high school bio classes that teach evolution teach a highly oversimplified version of Darwinian evolutionary theory even though Darmwin's theories have been largely disgarded as a nice start but wrong, and they also do nothing to distinguish between evolutionary theory and abiogenesis, and don't cover the later at all thus allowing students to make a false assumtion that evolutionary theory goes all the way back to the first appearance of life. This doesn't do the students any good, and if they don't go into a field where they need to learn biology and get the opportunity to unlearn the lies their teacher taught them they go on to be ignorant adults. If there isn't the time to teach students the truth it's much better to ignore the subject than to oversimplify it to the point of fiction.