You can't know your planet unless you know something about science and technology. School science courses, I remember, concentrated on the unimportant parts of science, leaving the major insights almost untouched. The great discoveries in modern science are also great discoveries of the human spirit. For example, Copernicus showed that --far from being the center of the universe, about which the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and the stars revolved in clockwise homage--the Earth is just one of many small worlds. This is a deflation of our pretensions, to be sure, but it is also the opening up to our view of a vast and awesome universe. Every high school graduate should have some idea of the insights of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein. (Einstein's special theory of relativity, far from being obscure and exceptionally difficult, can be understood in its basics with no more than first-year algebra, and the notion of a rowboat in a river going upstream and downstream.)