The following article certainly is an eye-opener, the
problem is worse than
many of us have thought all along. It is also written from
a Left-of-center
perspective, which shows repeatedly as you read. Greens
and feminists
are just as anti-science or science illiterate as many in
the Tea Party,
but there also is a major problem that goes unaddressed.
Without subtracting one iota from white ignorance, which
can be appalling,
my memory includes many episodes that still make me cringe
after many years,
there is the fact that the black population, by all
accounts, drags down
the averages for everyone else significantly, with
Hispanics, at least talking
about first generation immigrants, also screwing up
averages.
All of which says that one of the major objectives of
politics needs to be
educating the public. George W Bush emphasized this, as a
matter of fact.
But he didn't know the first thing about education except
commonplaces
and didn't seem to have ever tried to learn much of
anything on the subject
since, for him, "education" consisted of a simple
dictionary definition rather
than an entire disciple that requires research and study to
master. And now we
have a near-illiterate in all kinds of fields as Chief
Executive.
Regardless, education needs to become a political priority.
And this presents
all kinds of opportunities in politics, as its does in
content-providing in the
high tech realm and elsewhere in society. This ought to be
as obvious
as anything can get. But -apparently this is what to
expect- since it is,
this simple truth will be denied inasmuch as it does not
jibe with existing
priorities built upon other premises. OK with me, for now,
no use
in "fighting the system" at a time when winning is not a
possibility,
but there is a gamble in this equation, whether the current
situation
will continue indefinitely -or whether new conditions
will arise
that turn the tables.
My view is that the current situation cannot be maintained.
This does not say
when there might be a tipping point that makes
this obvious, but maybe
the best thing to say is that we can expect a tipping point
and it would
be a good idea to look for indications that a tipping point
is approaching.
Billy
skepticblog
Cultural ignorance and scientific
illiteracy
by Donald
Prothero, Aug 14 2013
An educated citizenry is the only safe repository for
democratic values.
— Thomas Jefferson
My previous post on “Shark Week” ended up on a thread about
American science literacy, so I thought I’d follow up on
this topic, which is the subject of the last chapter of my
new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten
our Future. We’ve heard a lot about the abysmal
ignorance of Americans, especially their lack of knowledge
of their own culture as well as any culture outside the U.S.
This video
is particularly hilarious and appalling. Apparently,
Americans don’t even know a triangle has 3 sides, or who
Tony Blair is, or that Australia is not North Korea.
For many years, The Tonight Show with Jay
Leno produced short comedy segments called “Jay
Walking.” Jay and his small camera crew would stroll the
streets of Hollywood or Universal Citywalk or Burbank, and
ask “the man on the street” simple questions about current
events, culture, history, government, science, and so on.
Invariably the interviewees would respond with astounding
demonstrations of their ignorance of basic facts about the
world, most of which they should have learned in high school
or much earlier. They ranged from people thinking Abraham
Lincoln was the first president, to not knowing the color of
the White House or where the Panama Canal is located. Their
ignorant responses reminds one of the famous Groucho Marx
gag, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” The displays of
misinformation and lack of knowledge were so appalling they
made the both the TV viewer and the studio audience laugh
with scorn (and a bit of uncomfortable self-recognition). Of
course, the Jay and the camera crew taped plenty of people
that DID know the correct answers, and they edited out all
but the funniest displays of ignorance. In fact, my wife and
I witnessed Jay and his crew taping at segment at the
Americana on Brand in Glendale, Calfornia, in early 2011.
Very little of what we heard (mostly non-entertaining
responses) ended up on the show that night.
Even though “Jay
Walking” is entertainment and not a scientific poll, many
rigorous studies confirm the general ignorance and lack of
cultural knowledge of the American public, despite the fact
that 85% of Americans complete high school (up from only 25%
in 1940), and almost 30% get a college education. A recent
poll was conducted by the American Revolution Center of 1001
US adults. Over 89% were confident they could pass it, but
83% actually failed. They found
that:
“• More Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the
composer of “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” than could identify
the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the
Constitution.
• More than 50 percent of respondents attributed the quote
“From each according to his ability to each according to his
needs” to either Thomas Paine, George Washington or
President Obama. The quote is from Karl Marx, author of “The
Communist Manifesto.”
• More than a third did not know the century in which the
American Revolution took place, and half of respondents
believed than either the Civil War, the Emancipation
Proclamation or the War of 1812 occurred before the American
Revolution.
• With a political movement now claiming the mantle of the
Revolutionary-era Tea Party, more than half of respondents
misidentified the outcome of the 18th-century agitation as a
repeal of taxes, rather than as a key mobilization of
popular resistance to British colonial rule.
• A third mistakenly believed that the Bill of Rights does
not guarantee a right to a trial by jury, while 40 percent
mistakenly thought that it did secure the right to vote.
• More than half misidentified the system of government
established in the Constitution as a direct democracy,
rather than a republic-a question that must be answered
correctly by immigrants qualifying for U.S. citizenship.”
Another
survey found that over 80% of Americans could not name
a single Supreme Court justice, and some of the people they
named (Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter) had left the
Court. In 2011, Newsweek gave 1000 Americans the standard
test that immigrants must pass to earn the U.S. citizenship.
Over 38% of native-born Americans failed
a simple test about American history and civics that
they were all taught in 8th grade and again in high school.
Among the questions: 29% couldn’t name the Vice-President
(and Joe Biden hasn’t really been hiding in the shadows like
some VPs); 73% couldn’t explain why we fought the Cold War;
44% could not define the Bill of Rights; 6% couldn’t even
identify Independence Day on the calendar. Even more
alarming was the general level of ignorance about world
events compared to just about any other developed nation,
which scored far higher than US citizens. For example,
Europeans were far more literate about the world: 68% of
Danes, 75% of Brits, 76% of Finns could identify the
Taliban, but only 58% of Americans can—even though we’re
fighting them right now in Afghanistan (and the other
nations aren’t). Maybe a century ago, such ignorance of the
outside world and isolationism might have not been a
problem, but now the U.S. is the sole remaining military
superpower in the world, and we’re constantly facing threats
from not only the wars Bush dragged us into (Iraq,
Afghanistan) but just about nearly every other conflict
(e.g., Libya in 2011).
Other polls show that American ignorance of their own
government and its processes leads to all sorts of myths
that politicians can manipulate. A 2010
World Public Opinion survey found that most voters
have no clue what the Federal government actually spends
money on. We hear one party constantly raising the cry of
“cut Federal spending” but nearly all the Federal budget is
tied up in categories (servicing our debts, military
expenses in the time of war, plus Social Security, Medicaid,
and Medicare) that no politician dares to touch (the same
poll said that 81% opposed cuts to Medicare, 78% opposed
cuts to Social Security, and 70% opposed cuts to Medicaid).
Instead, politicians attack budget categories like NPR or
the NEA or Planned Parenthood that are a miniscule fraction
of 1% of the total Federal budget. The poll showed that
Americans wanted to cut foreign aid and spending, from 27%
to 13% they thought it represented; it is actually less than
1% of the Federal budget. A study done by Stanford professor
James Fishkin showed that people, when polled about the
issues blind and then given the facts of the situation,
tended to make rational choices on budget issues. The
problem, is he sees it, is not that Americans are stupid
about budgetary issues, but simply ignorant or misinformed,
so that they are easily misled by politicians.
Such news stories pop up every few months, further
underlining not only the general factual ignorance of
Americans, especially their lack of curiosity about the
world around them. The reporters telling these stories
typically wring their hands in shame and shock that “more
people know who (name a pop star or actor) is than
(important political figure, like Speaker of the House
or Supreme Court Justice)”. The general American
ignorance of political and important cultural matters is
indeed appalling. It explains why much of the current
political debate about “obeying the Constitution” (which
Teabaggers claim to believe in) is followed by false
and ignorant statements about the Constitution (such
as claiming that the Constitution eliminated slavery, or
that the Founding Fathers tried to establish a Christian
nation) or by cries for actions that are blatantly
unconstitutional (such as their frequent attempts to
eliminate the separation of church and state).
If the general ignorance of Americans is not shocking
enough, their ignorance of science is even more staggering.
Study
after study
over the years shows a virtually unchanging and an abysmally
poor understanding of how the world really works. These
include such howlers as:
• Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth
to revolve around the Sun
• Only 59% of adults know that dinosaurs and humans never
co-existed (the “Flinstones model of prehistory”)
• Only 47% of adults can guess correctly the percentage of
the Earth’s surface covered by water
• Only 21% of adults answered all three of these questions
correctly
• And a surprisingly large number of American adults still
think the sun revolves around the earth! This is not just
the crackpot fanatics from the “Galileo
was wrong” site but people who think this out of pure
ignorance. No one knows how many American adults even think
the earth is flat, but it’s probably a lot more than just
the crazies who are part of the Flat Earth creationist
movement.
There are shockingly large numbers of adults do not know
which is larger, an electron or an atom. Most adults cannot
give simple definitions of concepts like the cell, the
molecule, or DNA. Only about 33% of adults agree with the
notion that more than half of human genes are identical to
those of mice, and only 38% of adults
recognize that humans have almost 98% of their genes in
common with chimpanzees. Only 35% think the Big Bang
describes the early history of our universe. Carl Sagan
(1996) estimated that 95% of American adults were
scientifically illiterate. Sagan was thinking of a far
higher level of science literacy than these simple
middle-school level science knowledge questions we have just
mentioned, and judging from numbers we have just cited, he
is not far off.
If American adults are so appallingly illiterate in
science, what about teenagers who are still supposed to be
taking science classes in school? Sadly, the numbers are
just as depressing. Most kids of high school age know about
the same amount of science or less than adults who haven’t
sat in a high-school science class for years. According to a
study by Jon Miller of Northwestern University (an expert on
science literacy who has studied it for years), U.S. high
school students are “below average and below most European
countries” on virtually every academic achievement test
administered in the past 30 years. Miller
found that exposure to a college science course, on
the other hand, made significant improvements on science
literacy, but only as measured against a baseline of almost
total ignorance. Currently, scholars are studying the
concept of “civic science literacy”, which is more than just
knowledge of science facts, but understanding science well
enough to apply to their everyday lives. Here again, the
results are equally depressing. Although the numbers are
slowly rising, Miller (in a 2007 study) found that the
“civic science literacy” of Americans was still less than
30%. As Miller
put it, “We should take no pride in a finding that 70
percent of Americans cannot read and understand the science
section of the New York Times”.
Another way to frame the question is to ask how we stack up
against other countries. Study after study has shown that
the U.S. is near the bottom of industrialized nations in
science literacy. One
recent study found that among 15-year-olds, the U.S.
ranked 29th among the nations of the world. At the top of
the list was Finland, followed by a number of other northern
European countries (the other Scandinavian countries,
Germany, France, the UK, plus developed or developing Asian
countries like Japan, South Korea, and China). Nearly every
other ranking in recent years gives similar results,
although the exact order of the Top 10 countries might be
shuffled a bit—but the U.S. always comes out near the bottom
along with countries like Turkey and Cyprus that have a
fraction of our wealth and our spending on education. That
alone is a mark of disgrace for our society—that we can
spend so much money per child, and yet end up with such
miserable results, and nearly every other industrialized
country does far better than we do. What does that say for
our future economic well being when we’re near the bottom on
crucial things like understanding science?
Even the PISA (Program for International Scientific
Assessment) reports, which focus
on overall science literacy rather than factual knowledge,
rank
the U.S. 15-year-olds 14th in the world in overall
science literacy in 2010, identical to their rank in 2000. A
close look at the questions in the PISA results shows that
they tend to exclude a lot of material that might be
influenced by creationist beliefs, which as I have argued
before, is one place where the American literacy rate
differs radically from most other developed nations in
Europe and Asia, as well as Canada. The PISA results (15th
place) aren’t as depressing as the other results (29th
place), but still nothing to brag about, and clearly not as
high as they should be given our national wealth and
compulsory education. Another point apparent in the PISA
results is the breakdown by racial and ethnic groups, with
whites doing better than Latinos and African-Americans. This
is not surprising, given how the quality of education in any
subject in school is strongly affected by issues of poverty
and language barriers. But then the question arises: if even
the white students in our best schools have much more spent
on their science education than in most other countries, why
aren’t they nearer the top of the list? Once again, we are
reminded of the appalling influence of creationism on the
education of the conservative, church-going white
population, which closes their minds to the bulk of
scientific knowledge, no matter how hard we try to educate
them.
Some
people would point out that ignorance and disinterest
in the world around them is the norm for much of human
history. After all, most humans in the past and even now
have lived in non-democratic societies, where they had no
real political voice, and thus no real interest in something
they cannot change. These people argue that only if a
national issue directly affects their lives do people emerge
from their little cocoons of trash TV, video games, and
local town gossip to engage the bigger world around them.
All most people care about is how to eke out a living, how
to spend time with their family and follow their favorite
pastimes, and the rest of what happens at the state,
national, or international level doesn’t engage them until
there is a direct effect on their lives. (I know a lot of
people who spend all their spare time playing computer games
and have no interest in anything outside this hobby—and many
other pastimes fit this description as well). Maybe in a
non-democratic society where the average individual has no
voice in their governance, this might be excusable. But as
the Jefferson quote at the top points out, in our democratic
society we cannot afford to be ignorant of politics and
world affairs, since we are expected to vote on these
issues. Nor can we afford to be so poorly informed in
science in a society where scientific issues affect our
everyday lives, and frequently become part of the political
discussion as well.
So why are we so scientifically illiterate? Everyone has a
favorite culprit. Certainly the media share a lot of the
blame, filling the airwaves and print and internet with
mountains of useless reality TV and pseudoscience and
celebrity gossip. Even the science they do present is
watered down and oversimplified, often to the point of being
distorted or just plain wrong. That was the point of last
week’s blog about the lies perpetrated by Discovery
Channel’s fake documentary. This is apparently where most
scientists feel the blame lies. There are many who
blame our educational system, and argue that students need
to be turned on to science early and provided with hands-on
experiments and active learning. This is probably also true,
but unrealistic in this age when education budgets are being
slashed to meet politician’s needs to cut costs without
raising taxes. I know many high school science teachers
personally, and they are at wit’s end. To them, the issue is
not just the problem of small budgets, inadequate supplies
and equipment, and huge classes. They battle an almost
impossible uphill struggle to keep the interest and
attention of the average American teenager, filled with
raging hormones and interests in cars, pop culture, video
games, and the opposite sex, and to get them to pay much
attention to science classes, no matter how wonderful and
inspiring the teachers try to make it.
As I pointed out in my 2009 book Greenhouse of the
Dinosaurs, one need only watch the transformation in
children’s programming to track the changes in kids’
interests. For the preschooler and pre-teens, many of the
shows are highly educational and filled with dinosaurs and
astronomy and other real science. Science is clearly “cool.”
Switch channels to the programs that cater to teens and
tweens: it’s all about boy-girl relationships and getting
along and being “cool” with your peers, along with lots of
teen celebrity gossip and pop music marketed just for
teeny-boppers. Science is no longer “cool” but “nerdy”; the
“popular” kids try to avoid looking like they might enjoy
it, even if they do. (Although teenagers do love computers
and technology, if only to better communicate with their
friends and catch the latest music or video or movie or
game). About the only factor that explains this change is
adolescence.
So how do the European countries and developed Asian
countries like Japan, South Korea, and China keep their
teenagers (with their own raging hormones) on track while
American kids lose interest? Most systematic surveys
on this topic suggest that these countries have far more
rigorous and demanding educational systems that expect more
of their students, and have high cultural expectations of
academic achievement (especially within the family). No
matter how many social and hormonal and cultural
distractions there are for teenagers, these Asian and
European students do much better than do American students.
In recent years, people have noticed that Finland has
consistently achieved the best results in education,
including science education. How do they do it? One study
showed:
“In the 1970s, reports Darling-Hammond, Finland’s student
achievement was low. But in the decades since, they have
steadily upgraded their education system until now they’ve
reached the top. What’s more, they took what was once a wide
achievement gap between rich and poor, and reduced it until
it’s now smaller than in nearly all other wealthy nations.
Here’s how:
* They got rid of the mandated standardized testing that
used to tie teachers’ hands.
* They provide social supports for students including a
free daily meal and free health care.
* They upgraded the teaching profession. Teachers now take
a three-year graduate school preparation program, free and
with a stipend for living expenses. In Finland, you don’t go
into debt to become a teacher.
* The stress on top-quality teaching continues after
teachers walk into their schools. Teachers spend nearly half
of their time in school in high-level professional
development, collaborative planning, and working with
parents.
These changes have attracted more people to the teaching
profession—so many that only 15 percent of applicants are
accepted.
The Finns trust their teachers, Darling-Hammond reports.
They used to have prescriptive curriculum guides running
over 700 pages. Now the national math curriculum is under 10
pages.
With the support of the knowledge-based business community
(think Nokia), Finnish schools focus on 21st century skills
like creative problem-solving, not test prep.”
Next post: Why does it matter?
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