Sir Harry Kroto has a breathtaking piece in the Grauniad today on the fact that the UK is turning out shockingly few scientists and engineers. The root cause is - in my experience - the 11-18 period, where science just isn't a draw for students. A lot of people who would be doing science at university aren't because of the fact that science at school is taught so badly. 
The root cause of so much distrust of things like computers is that people do not think scientifically about them, but just look on and give up. It's not going to bite you. But if you approach the problem logically, you can try and solve it. Like, if you push a button and it does something every time, you can make a tenuous hypothesis of how it works. But people don't.
Understanding the scientific method was one of the best things that has ever happened to me, because it's formalised something that I do every single day. If I am debugging a piece of code, I am engaging in a scientific practice of sorts. If I am reading the manual (as I find myself doing quite often) and try out a code sample, I am testing a hypothesis.
I can, if I am so inclined, open up the machine which is processing the code and see what is going on. Which is kind of a more useful way to look at the world than "the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it", which, once you clear off the (post-)modern spin, essentially the position of Blair et al.
Link via Dave Cross.
