| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
31 Aug 2005 03:04:26 AM |
| Object: |
Keep 'em ignorant and stupid |
From The New York Times, 8/30/05:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/science/30profile.html
Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much
By CORNELIA DEAN
CHICAGO -
When Jon D. Miller looks out across America, which he can almost do
from his 18th-floor office at Northwestern University Medical School
in Chicago, he sees a landscape of haves and have-nots - in terms not
of money, but of knowledge.
Dr. Miller, 63, a political scientist who directs the Center for
Biomedical Communications at the medical school, studies how much
Americans know about science and what they think about it.
His findings are not encouraging.
While scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only
20 to 25 percent of Americans are "scientifically savvy and alert," he
said in an interview.
Most of the rest "don't have a clue."
At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global
warming to stem cell research, he said, people's inability to
understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take
part in the democratic process.
Over the last three decades, Dr. Miller has regularly surveyed his
fellow citizens for clients as diverse as the National Science
Foundation, European government agencies and the Lance Armstrong
Foundation.
People who track Americans' attitudes toward science routinely cite
his deep knowledge and long track record.
"I think we should pay attention to him," said Eugenie Scott, director
of the National Center for Science Education, who cites Dr. Miller's
work in her efforts to advance the cause of evolution in the
classroom.
"We ignore public understanding of science at our peril."
Rolf F. Lehming, who directs the science foundation's surveys on
understanding of science, calls him "absolutely authoritative."
Dr. Miller's data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge.
American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other
than that they are really small).
Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity.
Only about 10 percent know what radiation is.
One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth,
an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.
At one time, this kind of ignorance may not have meant much for the
nation's public life.
Dr. Miller, who has delved into 18th-century records of New England
town meetings, said that back then, it was enough "if you knew where
the bridge should be built, if you knew where the fence should be
built."
"Even if you could not read and write, and most New England residents
could not read or write," he went on, "you could still be a pretty
effective citizen."
No more.
"Acid rain, nuclear power, infectious diseases - the world is a little
different," he said.
It was the nuclear power issue that first got him interested in public
knowledge of science, when he was a graduate student in the 1960's.
"The issue then was nuclear power," he said.
"I used to play tennis with some engineers who were very pro-nuclear,
and I was dating a person who was very anti-nuclear. I started doing
some reading and discovered that if you don't know a little science it
was hard to follow these debates. A lot of journalism would not make
sense to you."
Devising good tests to measure scientific knowledge is not simple.
Questions about values and attitudes can be asked again and again over
the years because they will be understood the same way by everyone who
hears them; for example, Dr. Miller's surveys regularly ask people
whether they agree that science and technology make life change too
fast (for years, about half of Americans have answered yes) or whether
Americans depend too much on science and not enough on faith (ditto).
But assessing actual knowledge, over time, "is something of an art,"
he said.
He varies his questions, as topics come and go in the news, but
devises the surveys so overall results can be compared from survey to
survey, just as SAT scores can be compared even though questions on
the test change.
For example, he said, in the era of nuclear tests he asked people
whether they knew about strontium 90, a component of fallout.
Today, he asks about topics like the workings of DNA in the cell
because "if you don't know what a cell is, you can't make sense of
stem cell research."
Dr. Miller, who was raised in Portsmouth, Ohio, when it was a dying
steel town, attributes much of the nation's collective scientific
ignorance to poor education, particularly in high schools.
Many colleges require every student to take some science, but most
Americans do not graduate from college.
And science education in high school can be spotty, he said.
"Our best university graduates are world-class by any definition," he
said. "But the second half of our high school population - it's an
embarrassment. We have left behind a lot of people."
He had firsthand experience with local school issues in the 1980's,
when he was a young father living in DeKalb, Ill., and teaching at
Northern Illinois University.
The local school board was considering closing his children's school,
and he attended some board meetings to get an idea of members'
reasoning.
It turned out they were spending far more time on issues like the cost
of football tickets than they were on the budget and other classroom
matters.
"It was shocking," he said.
So he and some like-minded people ran successfully for the board and,
once in office, tried to raise taxes to provide more money for the
classroom.
They initiated three referendums; all failed.
Eventually, he gave up, and his family moved away.
"This country cannot finance good school systems on property taxes,"
he said.
"We don't get the best people for teaching because we pay so little.
For people in the sciences particularly, if you have some skill, the
job market is so good that teaching is not competitive."
Dr. Miller was recruited to Northwestern Medical School in 1999 by
administrators who knew of his work and wanted him to study attitudes
and knowledge of science in light of the huge changes expected from
the genomic revolution.
He also has financing - and wears a yellow plastic bracelet - from the
Lance Armstrong Foundation, for a project to research people's
knowledge of clinical trials.
Many research organizations want to know what encourages people to
participate in a trial and what discourages them.
But Dr. Miller said, "It's more interesting to ask if they know what a
clinical trial is, do they know what a placebo is."
The National Science Foundation is recasting its survey operations, so
Dr. Miller is continuing surveys for other clients.
One involves following people over time, tracing their knowledge and
beliefs about science from childhood to adulthood, to track the way
advantages and disadvantages in education are compounded over time and
to test his theory that people don't wait until they are adults to
start forming opinions about the world.
Lately, people who advocate the teaching of evolution have been citing
Dr. Miller's ideas on what factors are correlated with adherence to
creationism and rejection of Darwinian theories.
In general, he says, these fundamentalist views are most common among
people who are not well educated and who "work in jobs that are
evaporating fast with competition around the world."
But not everyone is happy when he says things like that.
Every time he goes on the radio to talk about his findings, he said,
"I get people sending me cards saying they will pray for me a lot."
---
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http://www.spaink.net/cos/warhero/
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| User: "Bret Ludwig" |
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| Title: Re: Keep 'em ignorant and stupid |
31 Aug 2005 11:49:12 PM |
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All American jobs except those with really powerful unions-the medical
boards and Bar Associations, for example- are evaporating fast with
competition from overseas outsourcers and from legal and illegal
immigrants.
Education is not the solution, because lack of education is not the
problem. Too many American technical graduates are employed out of
field, underemployed, or misemployed for education to be the issue. It
is a red herring so they can bring in more ineducable beasts on the low
end and more bright young indentured servants at marginal wages in the
middle. However, they will not allow foreign CEOs with much greater
cost effectiveness in-wonder why?
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