Recently I read Matt Ridley's "Nature via nurture", "The origins of virtue", Jared Diamond's "Guns, germs and steel", Peter Turchin's "War and peace and war" and Paul Seabright's "The Company of strangers, a natural history of economic life" and I am surprised how ignorant I am despite being in academics most of my life. These books discuss many things relevant to understanding things in everyday life and might have made a difference if I had read them earlier. This phenomenon of ignorance seems common. Here is an excerpt from Edge. From:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/self...h06_index.html
"In the twentieth century, a period of great scientific advancement, instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world — of having a unity in which scholarship included science and technology along with literature and art — the official culture kicked them out. Traditional humanities scholars looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum — and out of the minds of many young people, who, as the new academic establishment, so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action.

Yet it's the products of this educational system that go straight from their
desks at university literary magazines to their offices in the heart of the cultural establishment at our leading newspapers, magazines, and publishers. It's a problem that's systemic and not individual. Unless one is pursuing a career path in science, it is extremely difficult for a non-science major at a top research university to graduate with anything approaching what can be considered an education in science. I recently talked with a noted Italian intellectual, who is as familiar with string theory and as he is with Dante, and writes about both in his philosophical novels. In appraising this situation, he argued for restraint and compassion. "They just don't know," he sighed, "they just don't know." He might well have added, they don't even know that they don't know.

Somebody needs to tell them. Otherwise, we wind up with the center of
culture based on a closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no
empirical contact with the real world. One can only marvel at, for example, art critics who know nothing about visual perception; "social constructionist" literary critics uninterested in the human universals documented by anthropologists; opponents of genetically modified foods, additives, and pesticide residues who are ignorant of genetics and evolutionary biology. "

The current system seems to be leading people to reasonably successful
careers but somehow to a state "They do'nt even know what they do'nt know".
Perhaps we need some changes in the curriculam and meanwhile forums like this may help to educate each other. I think all the books are worth translating in to regional languages. I would be interested in translating ( to telugu) Paul Seabright's book first if there is a small group interested. Those who have note read these books can google for reviews; all have excellent reviews.
swarup