Has, or has not, education in Sciences declined over the past three decades?
I ask because the Internet has exposed me to posts and pages by people who are opposed to scientific discovery, and, more generally, are suspicious of educated people (whom they call ‘elite’). Growing up in the '70s I remember advances in knowledge brought about by geology, aerospace, biology and medicine, and so on. While the knowledge base has continued to expand, in the '80s it seemed that more people were interested in making money than in the sciences.
JLA – I think part of the reason is that while the advances are still occurring, many of the discoveries are complex and difficult to explain to the layman. Then there is the fact that we are products of growing up during the space race and we, as a country, focused on the promise of what science could bring – then we got bored. Science/technology/engineering are not glamorous fields, they require sacrifice and discipline, and many of us are not that interesting to the layman. I have 3 engineering degrees and really think that I might have had a more rewarding (and easier) life, if I had gone into finance or economics. My .02 euro
Elementary school teacher, here.
I love teaching science. I think a good science program in elementary school can keep kids wanting to show up for class. When I say a good science program, I mean a hands-on one with lots of experiments and less round robin reading out of textbooks.
But here’s what happens in my school. I teach at a low-income school. Test scores are low. Kids are just passed on from the primary grades to the upper grades and most can’t read at grade level. After so many years of not reading well, it’s almost impossible to catch up.
So, we teach to the test. We use all kinds of test-prep materials which are usually meaningless to the kids, because they are written at the grade level the kids are in-not the level at which the kids read.
Since we have to spend all this time prepping kids for the standardized tests, there has been a de-emphasis in content areas like social studies and science. This is why, in my opinion, U.S. students are behind in science.
Plus, there is an ignorance of the idea that the very concept of “grade level” for all is unachievable. The idea was created by watching what “normal” kids can do tat that age, but by definition about half the kids can’t do that, and even with intervention help, probably 30% can’t do it. If there are smart people, the BY DEFINITION there are dumb people, but politicians seem to think that programs can raise the lower part to match the middle part.
I admit that there are vast social problems in the lower part, but if you solve them, you’ll just then change the definition of “grade level”. There’s no possibility of all children meeting “grade level”.
Having worked in the Corporate world most of my career, I think it would be much more fulfilling to work in a different field. When I was doing my very small part in flight test data, I was proud of my job. I liked getting the memos saying, ‘Thank you for your contribution to STS-[whatever].’ I liked the smell of jet fuel in the morning. I felt I was part of something Important. When I went into the Corporate world, I was just another employee who was subject to mass layoffs so the stockholders could see a temporary rise in their dividends. Would I like a six- or seven-figure salary? Sure, who wouldn’t? But I’d rather have a modest salary doing something fun. (FWIW, I’m still working with financial data; but it’s for a non-profit company and it doesn’t have that creepy/Office Space Corporate ‘feel’ to it. And I’m having some fun.)
But back to Science.
In another thread, DSYoungEsq wrote:
I’ve read posts at other places where people really do believe we never landed on the Moon. I’ve also read posts by Young Earth Creationists who believe the planet is only 6,000 years old. And let’s not even get into Evolution… What all of these things have in common is a lack of critical thinking. For the Moon, anyone can do a bit of reading and see the slow, methodical – and often deadly – steps that led to the One Small Step. It’s all documented and logical. To deny the landing is to deny the evidence, and also to assume that untold thousands of people can keep their mouths shut. For the YECs and Creationists, they not only deny (literal) mountains of evidence, but some of them cut-and-paste pseudo-science into their posts and then wave away arguments that point out the errors in their ‘proof’.
This is not new. I went to high school very near to the ‘headquarters’ of the Flat Earth Society. But that was before the Internet. Now, the anti-science people are more visible and I think that might be why I have the impression that science education has been declining. If it’s just an artifact of perception, then there’s not much to worry about. But we’ve all seen how rapidly misinformation spreads on the 'Net. I fear such information will gain momentum.
And then I read Gail’s post, and it seems that in some places it is difficult to teach (or for students to learn) the basics – let alone critical thinking or elementary science. If kids can barely add and subtract, how can they learn chemistry or engineering? Heck, how can they learn to follow a recipe? If they can barely read or write and are slow in reading comprehension, how can they use analogies to evaluate something new?
But again, this is just my impression; hence my question whether my impression is correct.
It’s called anti-intellectualism, and it’s been around for centuries. Some reactionary people fear the loss of traditional mores/methods that seems to be associated with technological advance, and so anti-intellectualism has been a significant part of hostility around the world toward western culture over the years. A prominent example is the Khmer Rouge, who targeted (among others) anyone who had been to college, or anyone who wore glasses. In the present day, islamic extremist movements also embody elements of anti-intellectualism.
In the '70’s, Archie Bunker (of the American sit-com “All In The Family”) was a prominent example of reactionary/anti-intellectualism, as his values were constantly clashing with those of his daughter’s college-educated boyfriend/husband. I had heard that this character was unexpectedly popular.
I don’t know how they used to teach science, but personally I think that regardless of whether it’s changed or not, that they need to focus less on teaching what we’ve actually learned (theory of gravity, theory of evolution, etc.) and focus more on the basics: The scientific method, logical fallacies, the peer review process, cognitive biases, etc. Really hammer those home for years on end. Give the students research projects to study and let that be how they learn what’s already known. Save actual presentations on geology/chemistry/physics/etc. until high school or even college. Otherwise figure that so long as you’ve taught them how to learn on their own and approach things critically, access to the Wikipedia will answer any questions they might have on the current state of human knowledge.
I don’t mean to pick on you, but the attitude that educated people should be above suspicion is precisely what has led to anti-elitism. A guy who thinks the climatology community is wrong about global warming and cares enough to put together a crackpot web page may be wrong on the facts, but he’s closer to being a scientist than any of the hero-worshiping hipsters who write for Discover magazine.
Being suspicious of educated people is what started science in the first place. The classical philosophers had natural science tied up neat and clean until those meddling kids started fooling around with telescopes and pendulums.
None of this proves science education is on the decline, because it doesn’t prove science education was any better 10 years, 20, 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago.
My guess is that science education is for the most part probably BETTER than it ever has been before, in large part because most education’s better than it used to be. Obviously local conditions may vary, but for the most part kids learn stuff now earlier than they did when I was in school, and I know I learned things earlier than my parents did. Far more is expected of children in school now (homework levels are shockingly weighty as compared to what I was expected to do.) Whether that’d good or bad you can argue, but certainly on the whole they’re trying. The problems you describe are
Virtually endless and universal. Conspiracy theories, ignorance, stubborness and flat-out stupidity are not new things. Concern about science education is also not new; people were very seriously concerned about science eduation in the USA fifty years ago to the extent that it was considered nationally scandalous, especially after the embarrassment of Sputnik.
In many cases, are the product of religious zealotry, not a failure of the educational system. There is nothing a teacher can reasonably be expected to do that will reliably change the mind of a child being raised to believe in myths by fundamentalists.
The reason kids can barely add, subtract, and read is that they’re kids. The idea is to teach them these things. They are learning these skills just as well as they ever have, and in fact probably a little better.
The “kids are ignorant today” thing has been around since LONG before you were born; it was said about kids when you were a kid, when Gail was a kid, when I was a kid, when our parents were kids, and likely when THEIR parents were kids. (The speaker, if a parent, usually mentions how their own kids are different.) There’s not really any rational reason to believe it is true; if all these warnings were true we’d have regressed to the level of Australopithecus by now.
You’re right, of course. Except that the opposition to the classical philosophers were also educated, who provided facts to back up their claims. Today people ignore facts and name-call ones who don’t.
This is true; hence, my solicitation of opinions.
I may be unlucky, in that I tend to run into people who don’t know a commutative property from a cumulonimbus.
I’ll agree with this. When I was a kid we didn’t need backpacks.
Before my time, but having been born during the Space Age I remember it effects. This is part of what I was thinking when I started this thread.
One thing we, as a people, can do is to insist that religious agendas not be taught as science. ‘Creation Science’ is disproved by overwhelming evidence.
I was going off of Gail comment about ‘teaching to the test’. Teaching to the test is a poor substitute for imparting knowledge.
O tempera! O mores! I admit to bias here. When I was in high school we had the Jocks (athletics-types), Goat Ropers (kids from agricultural families), Loados (drug-users), Brainiacs (the high-achievers), and Everyone Else (hoping to get good grades, basically just floating through). I tended to hang out with the Brainiacs, so my friends in high school tended to be the intellectual-types. So when I see high school kids today that seem not to know things that were obvious to me in high school, I forget that I hung out with a different crowd. This may be the root of my perception.
I see your point, but young kids just aren’t ready to point out logical fallacies or really get the scientific method (they can’t make hypotheses, just random guesses). They are ready to have a lot of fun making stuff fizz, or learning about volcanoes, etc. I think you’re wanting to put the theory before the content, and IMO it takes a lot of content before students are ready to understand and use theory. You need to work with the content in order to understand the ideas.
And therefore I’m going to spend a lot of time this year teaching my elementary-age kids about simple machines, electricity, magnetism, and so on. It’s physics year, woot!
Here’s an interesting article. Apparently, despite the public’s overall admiration of scientists, they are surprisingly critical of their findings. Some eye-opening statistics in this link, I think.
The content, though, has nothing to do with the theory, unlike mathematics.
As is, at least in my case, kids don’t really get to science education until around the 6th grade (11/12yo). I was developing my own system of philosophy at that age,* so I really doubt that there’s a cognitive level of capability that needs to be reached that kids physically haven’t by that age.
And there’s also no reason that you can’t teach science theory as simple fact. If I can teach that Napoleon conquered Europe, I can teach the story of the horse who could count to 10.
I did a presentation of it in class, instead of a book report.
Without any scientific data, I am gussesing that actual Science education has not actually declined over the years.
One thing that has happened is that the Internet (which was created IIRC by Science) has given a voice to millions of ignorant and misinformed people who would otherwise have been left in relative isolation. For many of these people, the internet has not been a source of education but instead has been a method for them to seek validation and support for their absurd views.
Financially, with the loss of manufacturing here in the US (which uses Science to design many of its products), the best and brighest tended to flock to careers like banking and finance, consulting or law which tend to be much more lucrative.
Finally, I think you always have to expect a certain amount of anti-intellectualism from the Common Folk. Most people live simple, un-Sciency lives of trying to be popular, getting drunk on weekends and working regular non-Science jobs. Science is usually something incomprehensible. Lets face it. Most people are pretty dumb. Not dumber than they used to be, but nevertheless not that smart. I have a degree in engineering (which uses Science) and even I found it difficult. Many of my fellow students in business school or liberal arts simply did not have the ability to grasp the complex math or logic and other Sciency stuff we had to learn. Preferring instead to take “soft” classes where there were no “wrong” answers so long as they were creative enough.
Quite often, Common Folk view Science as the domain of Eggheads, Nerds and other outsiders since it is something that is inaccessable to them. They often resist the advice of “Ivory Tower Eggheads” trying to change the way they do things with their “Book Learnin”, preferring to rely on “gut instinct”, “real world experience” and “shit everyone just knows”.
Without any scientific data, I am gussesing that actual Science education has not actually declined over the years.
One thing that has happened is that the Internet (which was created IIRC by Science) has given a voice to millions of ignorant and misinformed people who would otherwise have been left in relative isolation. For many of these people, the internet has not been a source of education but instead has been a method for them to seek validation and support for their absurd views.
Financially, with the loss of manufacturing here in the US (which uses Science to design many of its products), the best and brighest tended to flock to careers like banking and finance, consulting or law which tend to be much more lucrative.
Finally, I think you always have to expect a certain amount of anti-intellectualism from the Common Folk. Most people live simple, un-Sciency lives of trying to be popular, getting drunk on weekends and working regular non-Science jobs. Science is usually something incomprehensible. Lets face it. Most people are pretty dumb. Not dumber than they used to be, but nevertheless not that smart. I have a degree in engineering (which uses Science) and even I found it difficult. Many of my fellow students in business school or liberal arts simply did not have the ability to grasp the complex math or logic and other Sciency stuff we had to learn. Preferring instead to take “soft” classes where there were no “wrong” answers so long as they were creative enough.
Quite often, Common Folk view Science as the domain of Eggheads, Nerds and other outsiders since it is something that is inaccessable to them. They often resist the advice of “Ivory Tower Eggheads” trying to change the way they do things with their “Book Learnin”, preferring to rely on “gut instinct”, “real world experience” and “shit everyone just knows”.
In a sense, neither do I. Well, no, that isn’t true; I know a cumulonimbus is a cloud. But I don’t really know which one it is (it’s a fluffy one, I think.) The only cloud I am absolutely confident I could identify is a mushroom cloud. And while I am no genius, I’m an educated and literate person.
Nobody can know everything, so care must be taken to ensure that when you note someone is ignorant of something, you remember that doesn’t mean they’re ignorant of everything. You probably know your clouds pretty well because, IIRC, you’re a person who knows flight. But I could probably stump you on any number of questions of relatively similar difficulty in other disciplines.
I know this seems a bit off topic, but bear with me. We all think we’re smarter than everyone else, and of course, when it comes to kids, you ARE smarter than they are, because they’re kids. But there’s an inherent bias in our perceptions in that we tend to notice a person’s level of knowledge in fields that interest us more than we do fields that do not, and since you tend to know a lot about fields that interest you you’ll always be more knowledgable than the average person who isn’t. I know a lot more about baseball than almost anyone I’ve ever met, so I tend to notice when people know nothing of baseball. But I don’t know who is or isn’t knowledgeable in biology because that’s a subject on which I’m not extensively informed, and it’s not something I have much interest in getting into conversations about. I can easily perceive someone’s ignorance of baseball, but I cannot easily perceive their superiority of understanding in biology.
Because of that effect, plus the fact that most of us think we’re smarter than we really are, as well as pure egocentrism, we tend to see ignorance all around us. We also tend to (a) see the worst in everyone else more than the best, which is why so many parents are convinced kids are generally awful but their own kids are a rare exception, (b) misinterpret people not acting in our interest as acting stupidly, and (c) romanticize and exaggerate how quickly WE learned as children.
But by any objective measure, the rest of the world cannot be made up of idiots, or else the world would not function. This message board (and most others) is plagued with people marvelling at how stupid their co-workers are, especially all those idiotic managers, and yet somehow industry and commerce go on as they always have and the economy has not collapsed into a Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic wasteland. I’m forced to conclude that in fact most people’s co-workers probably are not idiots, and given the popularity of the subject, that the people complaining about their sub-moronic co-workers are having the same complaints tossed at them by the very people they’re bitching about.
This is, essentially, the same effect that creates the “kids are terrible today” effect, for which there is no objective evidence whatsoever, but it’s magnified by the fact that the people saying it are decades removed from their own childhood and don’t correctly remember the details.
These are both good points and I agree wholeheartedly, but science education in the past was plagued by these and other problems as well. Standardized testing is nothing new - the current form is recent, but the concept and application is as old as the hills - and religious stupidity goes back beyond the dawn of recorded history. Teaching 40 or 50 years ago often had weaknesses teaching today often does not - the schools of 1959 spent too much time and rote memorization, overemphasized excessive punitive discipline, and not incidentally were segregated in many places (in the USA.)
We’re never going to be perfect at teaching, and I’ll go so far as to agree there is great room for improvement, but I don’t believe it’s worse than it was before. I think it’s better.
The generic public’s attitude towards science is, I think, a different matter. You can lead a horse to water, blah blah blah. Lots of the fools who believe in creationism and that the WTC was brought down by “thermite” got perfectly good science educations but have simply prioritized what they want to believe above what the evidence states. And frankly, people lack the time to become fully informed on these matters.
This may be the most horrifying sentence that I’ve ever read in my entire life.
Scientific concepts are generally complicated and take time to learn. My first biology class spent half a semester covering the structure of DNA and protein synthesis. That’s why an introductory physics class will take months to reach Newton’s laws of motion. That’s why chemistry books devote so much space to the structure of the atom. These topics and others require learners to do many things: learn new vocabulary, understand complicated relationships, grasp symbolic meanings, and tie everything together into ‘the big picture’. A student will only pick this stuff up if it’s presented at length by a knowledgeable teacher and accompanied by good reading, visuals, and other materials.
Telling students to go read Wikipedia is a recipe for disaster. There’s a vast gap between reading the words “an object’s acceleration is proportional to the net force applied and inversely proportional to the mass” and actual understanding what those words mean.
(Besides which, Wikipedia is a worthless source for many reasons: (1) It’s usually wrong. (2) It’s poorly written and dull. (3) It’s disorganized, and the necessary information for any one topic may be scattered across dozens of different pages. (4) It gives too much space to trivial topics and too little to important topics.)
Next year 2 of my kids will be studying Molecular Biology and Aero Engineering at a state college. They took some exceptional science courses in their public HS. Of course, we live in a decent school system, and they took advantage of honors and AP classes. So I can’t speak as to what is out there for everyone, but at least for some kids who seek it out, it is available.
OTOH, they regularly speak of situations where their classmates say boneheaded things like not believing in evolution. You can’t teach someone who refuses to learn . . .
I admit to bias here. When I was in high school we had the Jocks (athletics-types), Goat Ropers (kids from agricultural families), Loados (drug-users), Brainiacs (the high-achievers), and Everyone Else (hoping to get good grades, basically just floating through). I tended to hang out with the Brainiacs, so my friends in high school tended to be the intellectual-types. So when I see high school kids today that seem not to know things that were obvious to me in high school, I forget that I hung out with a different crowd. This may be the root of my perception.