Astronomy education and culture

Abstract

The 2020 pandemics has brought about a revolution in education, thanks to the pervasiveness of online teaching. Contents, methods and techniques can now be rapidly shared across the globe. On the downside, a number of disciplines have been neglected or dropped altogether. Our paper aims to address the following questions: How has Astronomy in culture been affected? Why is it important to keep it alive? What are the solutions? We suggest that it has been dismissed for two reasons: first, it is perceived as a niche topic – some sort of erudite chatter about non-essential curiosities – that can be sacrificed in favour of more practical information; second, it is heavily culture-specific, meaning that it requires extra effort from the teachers, as it cannot be easily copied or translated from other sources.