Last spring when former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan disclosed that First Lady Nancy Reagan had consulted an astrologer in arranging the President`s schedule, that both Reagans read their horoscopes daily and that the President believes 33 is his lucky number, the Washington press corps went wild. The nation`s scientific community collectively shuddered, but it could not have been very surprised.
Surveys show that plenty of Americans believe in astrology, lucky numbers, UFOs and other ideas well outside the scientific mainstream.
Every two years since 1979, Jon D. Miller, director of the Public Opinion Laboratory at Northern Illinois University, has been asking a nationally representative sample of 2,000 adults about their understanding of science and scientific issues for the National Science Board, the governing arm of the National Science Foundation.
”In these surveys we`ve asked people what they think about various kinds of scientific issues ranging from nuclear power to genetic engineering,”
explains Miller, who also is a professor of political science.”We`ve asked some substantive questions about what they know about various areas. We`ve asked when they read a newspaper about a scientific study if they know what it means to study something scientifically.
”We`ve asked if they have a clear understanding of what the word
`radiation` means and other vocabulary words because my own belief is that part of literacy is being able to read things on a technical topic meant for public consumption. It seems to me that people who can consume information in a New York Times science story or a Newsweek story or a Discover magazine story and comprehend most of it are, as a general rule, people who are scientifically literate. That`s really the kind of yardstick that we`re trying to get at.
”And out of that we create a scale that tells us how many people we think are scientifically literate. It`s now about 5 percent of American adults. That`s all. It was 7 percent in 1979, and in 1985 it has gone down a couple of points.”
The most recent survey, conducted in 1985, reported that almost two-thirds of American adults read their horoscopes periodically and 15 percent, or about 26 million people, read them often. Moreover, 39 percent of adults believe that astrology is scientific, with 7 percent or about 12 million people reporting that they sometimes change their plans after reading their horoscope.
Women and the least-educated people are more likely to read their horoscopes, and they are somewhat more likely to believe them, according to the survey. Although two-thirds of college graduates reject the claim that astrology has a scientific basis, a majority of those who dropped out of high school believe astrology is scientific.
Forty percent of all adults believe some numbers are lucky for some people, including 60 percent of those who did not finish high school and 25 percent of those who hold graduate degrees.
Similarly, 41 percent of adults agree with the statement, ”Rocket launchings and other space activities have caused changes in our weather,”
including 50 percent of women, 31 percent of men, 43 percent of high school graduates and 28 percent of college graduates.
And 43 percent of adults agree with the statement, ”It is likely that some of the unidentified flying objects that have been reported are really space vehicles from other civilizations.” This was the only question whose answers did not differ significantly according to gender and education level. Miller attributes the deterioration in scientific literacy between 1979 and 1985, in large part, to the numbers of young adults coming out of high school who learned even less+science+than did many of their parents.
”To a very large extent in the United States, science and mathematics beyond the first year of high school have become voluntary,” he says. ”The year before last, only 15 percent of American high school graduates had taken a physics course, only 30 percent had a chemistry course and only 35 percent had an algebra course. Which means that vast numbers of young people graduating from high school had no chemistry and no algebra. Therefore, the fact that they can`t read your newspaper is not surprising.
”If they`re trying to read a radiation story, if they`re trying to read about the Harvard mouse (the first genetically engineered strain of mouse to be patented), if they`re trying to read any story that involves a reference to recombinant DNA, they would not know what DNA was and they would not have the foggiest notion what recombinant DNA might involve.”
Some newspaper editors in whose publications these scientific terms appear might not have the foggiest notion, either.
As part of a survey on the creation-evolution debate, Michael Zimmerman, a professor of biology at Oberlin College, recently mailed questionnaires to the managing editors of 1,563 newspapers. He chose newspaper editors because he needed an educated, nonacademic group to balance the students, teachers and school board presidents he had previously queried. But after 834 completed questionnaires were returned, Zimmerman discovered some data he had not anticipated-a shocking ignorance of scientific facts.
Only 51 percent of the editors who responded disagreed strongly with the statement, ”Dinosaurs and humans lived contemporaneously,” while slightly over 37 percent agreed with the statement or expressed no opinion. One-third of the editors did not disagree strongly when presented with the statement, ”The Earth is approximately 6,000 to 20,000 years old.”
Similarly, only 42 percent of the editors agreed strongly with the correct statement, ”The Earth is approximately 4 billion to 5 billion years old.”
Zimmerman allows that everyone forgets trivial facts, but when well-educated newspaper editors seem to have forgotten or never learned knowledge that is so basic, he says he is worried. ”It`s a shame that people have a Fred Flintstone view of the world,” he says. ”I`m convinced that in large part that`s where (such misinformation) comes from. People have just internalized a cartoon world of cave men running around with dinosaurs, and it has become real. If we don`t have a real concept of the world when we start making decisions about technological issues, it`s kind of frightening.
”More and more power is going to be given to scientists to make technological decisions. That`s the way it was in the old days. Sorcerers, who were not really sorcerers at all but just scientifically literate people, had an inordinate amount of power.
”So it`s really important that high-quality science be disseminated, and I think our media are not doing a good job. They tend to disseminate flashy information rather than hard science, and far too often the stories that end up being published are health-related, cure-related. And, more important, our scientists are not doing a good job-that is, we scientists are tied up in laboratories, and we`re not getting out and making+science+accessible nearly as much as we should be. Because if we are not a technologically illiterate society, we`re frighteningly close to it.”
Today, more than during any other era in history, science pervades our society in such pressing public issues as acid rain, AIDS, genetic
engineering, toxic waste, nuclear power, the ”Star Wars” defense system, the space shuttle program and ozone-layer depletion, to name a few. One study estimates that about half the bills introduced in Congress involve science and technology to some degree.
”It`s not only thatscience+s so pervasive in our lives now but also that the pace has quickened,” says Walter Massey, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the University of Chicago`s vice president for research and the Argonne Laboratory.
”Now the time from the point where there is a discovery in the laboratory to the point at which there is something that affects our lives is much shorter than it used to be. It used to take 25 or 30 years before a discovery would turn into a product or a treatment or diagnostic tool that would actually be on the market or in the hospitals. And over that period there was adequate time for all the testing, for all the public to be aware, for all the implications to be thought about.
”That makes it even more important for the public to be aware. Things are moving so fast that if you don`t have some sense of what`s going on-even if you don`t have the technical background-it`s almost impossible for you to take part in any meaningful discussion. And it`s certainly impossible for you to figure out how to vote on any issue that involves these topics.”
Says Miller: ”Usually people in this country have been very good at sacrifices when they know what they`re sacrificing for. But no one`s very good at sacrificing when you don`t know what you`re sacrificing for, and it`s hard to convince somebody who can`t understand the language. There`s a hole in the ozone layer. Well, so what? If you don`t have a sense of the structure of the planet and the effect of the stratosphere and atmosphere around it, then it has no meaning.”
The last great national outcry about science came after the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit in October, 1957, beating America into outer space. Though the White House officially said that the satellite launching came as no surprise, it did, in fact, stun American scientists and the military and certainly the general public. The news reports of the day had an ominous tone as Sputnik`s eerie beeps were broadcast over television and radio and Cold War rhetoric rang in the Russian announcements of their achievement. Time magazine opined that ”U.S. policymakers probably have been seriously underestimating Russian scientific capability; in vital sectors of the technology race the U. S. may well have lost its precious lead.”
And politicians implied that Americans just were not trying hard enough as they basked in the glow of post-World War II optimism and prosperity. ”The time has clearly come,” said New Hampshire Republican Styles Bridges, then the reigning conservative of the U. S. Senate, ”to be less concerned with the depth of pile on the new broadloom rug or the height of the tail fin on the new car and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat and tears.”
The National Science Foundation called for increased government support of basic scientific research, and at least one scientist warned that the
”most probable way” the Russians would defeat America would not be by military attack, but rather they would ”advance so fast in+science+and leave us so far behind that their way of doing things will be the way, and there will be nothing we can do about it.”
Then, just as now, the discussion centered on the state of education. Science teachers criticized parents for failing to help and inspire their children to academic excellence. At the universities, education professors said that such basics as mathematics,+scienc e+and foreign languages should be stressed and frivolous extracurricular activities cut back.
Teachers, teacher training and school administrators also took a drubbing. During National Education Week in a speech called ”Education in the Light of the Satellites,” University of California chemist Joel Hildebrand called for the wholesale abandonment of the distortions of philosopher-educator John Dewey`s thinking that led many schools to fall for the cult of life adjustment. ”One of our greatest dangers lies in an anti-
intellectualism fostered by school authorities who should be among its most valiant opponents,” he said. ”One expression of it is the pious cliche, `We teach boys and girls, not subjects.` . . . How fortunate it is that Galileo, Beethoven, Faraday and Pasteur had not been taught to work in an atmosphere of social awareness.”
In New York City, the High School Teachers Association declared that only 25 percent of the city`s high school+science+teachers and 40 percent of the mathematics teachers had the proper certification to teach those subjects.
Stories about the Russian education system abounded, revealing that the average Soviet student learned more mathematics and+science+by the end of 10th grade in 6-day school weeks (with brief vacations dispersed thoughout the year) than most American college graduates. Smaller teacher-student ratios made it possible to begin teaching biology in 4th grade, a foreign language in the 5th grade, algebra, geometry and physics in the 6th and chemistry in the 7th. At the time, it was said, less than a third of American high school graduates had taken even one year of chemistry and physics, while only 1 in 15 had a year of advanced mathematics.
The result of all the handwringing was a perceived shortage of scientists and engineers, says Northern Illinois University`s Miller, and the National Defense Education Act was designed to correct it. ”What it did was substantially increase the difficulty of high school science and mathematics. College curricula were substantially strengthened, and the number of doctoral programs was doubled and the quality increased enormously.
”It worked. But it also did something not intended: It conveyed the message to millions of young people that+science+and mathematics are only for the best and the brightest, but that it`s too tough for average people. And that`s not true. It`s not too tough for average people and, secondly, it`s a kind of erosion of our intellectual base as a country to have people avoiding those topics.”
For this generation, the galvanizing force behind growing concern about scientific illiteracy may not turn out to be an event as dramatic as Sputnik but rather the steady erosion of America`s status in a global economy and its failure to respond aggressively to the challenges posed by Japan and Western Europe in scientific and technical affairs. That, coupled with an explosion of technology and information, is spurring another reform movement.
The experts say that engineers and scientists still are needed, particularly because the college-age population is shrinking and the demand is increasing, but the goals now under discussion are even broader: to ensure that everyone is scientifically literate enough to make political decisions on scientific issues and able to survive in a job market that is becoming increasingly dominated by technology.
Miller defines ”scientific literacy” as a ”combination of a reasonable vocabulary of scientific and technical terms and a basic understanding of scientific thinking.” And he adds a third dimension, ”technological literacy,” which he defines as an understanding of the impact of+science+
(through its technical applications) on society and vice versa.
Tests of scientific knowledge show that American students are not doing well compared with their counterparts in other countries. In some cases, they are ranked as low as students in developing nations.
A survey testing the+science+knowledge of samples of three school populations in 17 countries-10-year-olds, 14-year-olds and students in their final year of secondary school-was conducted by the International Association for Educational Achievement between 1983 and 1986. American 10-year-olds did relatively well, ranking 8th out of 17, with 10-year-olds in Japan, Korea, Finland and Sweden ranking the highest and those in England, Hong Kong, Poland and Singapore scoring at the bottom.
But at age 14, the situation deteriorates. American students ranked 15th out of 17 countries with Hong Kong and the Philippines occupying the 16th and 17th places. Thailand also ranked 14th, but Thailand has only 32 percent of an age group in school while America has 100 percent of an age group in school, according to the study. In 1970, the last time such a survey was taken, the American 14-year-olds ranked 7th.
Students in the final year of secondary school were tested in biology, chemistry and physics. In general, Hong Kong, England and Singapore scored the highest, with Canada, Italy, Finland and the United States scoring the lowest. Singapore was the highest-scoring country in biology, followed by England, Hungary, Poland and Hong Kong. The United States ranked last in biology. In chemistry and physics, students in Hong Kong scored the highest. Japan ranked 10th in biology and 4th in both chemistry and physics.
The bottom 25 percent of students performed particularly badly in England, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore and the United States. According to the report, ”the lowest-scoring children were scoring at chance level, indicating that from the test`s point of view, they were scientifically illiterate.”
