What I'd like to see is much more appreciation of critical thinking, trial and error - no, you don't get the answer right the first time - and the empirical method applied to processes and situations from everyday life, rather than being reserved for lab situations with ripple tanks and oscilloscopes and other doodads and thingummies.
Understanding science as policy direction is possibly more useful than optics to most people.
And (see Feyerabend) "the method" is not what elementary science books teach in their "scientific method" chapters (another example of good curriculum destroyed by rote and bad teaching) but rather a critical-thinking attitude to problem solving. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
