Several years ago an interesting debate was raised by the late J. Pasachoff in the AER. The central issue was the imperative to bring students and public to "modern" views of science, and of cosmology in particular. The opposite view held that not even the simplest things like tides or Kepler's laws were properly understood and grasped, and thus it should be better to take frontier topics out of curricula. The situation, if anything, is worse now. New instruments and wild ideas have appeared, and are very attractive to the students and public, but we have not yet solved how to cope with the problem of teaching. I shall discuss these topics in this talk, and exemplify some points with a Resource Survey made in Brazil, in which some crucial issues emerge quite clearly.
