I completely agree with your 1 and 2 points about what is going on. As a high school science teacher for the last 10 plus years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic and have basically arrived at the same conclusion you have. What really got me thinking about this topic, from an educational angle, was studying the “standards” and curriculum that the states and nations require our students to “learn”. They are basically nothing but long lists of trivia and vocabulary that are quickly forgotten, easily googled, and basically irrelevant to our students lives. So I had to ask myself what was the point of teaching this stuff to my students. And then I arrived at the real question this entire thread is getting at: “what are they (students, people, etc) going to do or be able to do with this level of knowledge or understanding.” My answer was, nothing.

As you point out in your 2 points, only after graduate level work do you really begin to understand a field and in order to keep that understanding, you must continue to “keep up with the literature.” This is obviously impossible, especially for the breadth of knowledge needed to deal with all the various science topics a person might run into in their lifetime. So you are left with an inadequate understanding of virtually all science topics, for the purposes of actually putting that knowledge to use in most circumstances. Personally, I think we should shoot for some kind of “science appreciation” type of class, where students feel comfortable and maybe even interested in science and develop the ability to ask useful science questions about things they want/need to know about and are ok with relying on or trusting actual scientists in those fields to provide answers at the time those answers are needed. Basically, people have virtually no choice but to “trust the experts” if they want to get any useful knowledge out of the fields of science. The challenge is developing that trust between the public and the actual people who do and know the science. And yes, understanding and exploring how science works is probably ONE of the most effective ways to accomplish that, but it’s not the only thing that’s needed.

This topic, the purpose and meaning of “science literacy”, has been studied and expounded upon for over a century. There are many papers and books by scientists, educational researchers, science education researchers, and others about this topic going back well over 100 years, with most of today’s positions simply being rehashings of older views. I’ll leave you with one blog post link from the UK, which I think does a decent job of introducing some of the issues. If you want some more sources, I would be happy to provide them.

http://doctoralicebell.blogspot.com/2010/08/myth-of-scientific-literacy.html