Scientific Gullibility

Yes another Targum letter...

After graduating from Rutgers, I sort of lost my sense of what the average American knows about science. If I were to give an average American a basic biology test, there's a pretty good chance that they would fail miserably. I could ask an average American what meiosis was and they wouldn't have the slightest idea.

It's the nature of science that is emphasized to us as educators. It's not necessarily our job to hammer content into student's heads, it's our job to promote skepticism and analytical thinking. So even if a student thinks the sun is a living organism, I can't tell them they're wrong up front. It's my job to ask them questions to justify their reasoning and to have students make sound decisions about what they observe. Hopefully a healthy interrogation of reasoning will help students realize that they've based their beliefs on false premises.

Science isn't always about getting things right, it's about process and rational thinking. Unfortunately, many of my students have these deep seeded misconceptions that are so misguided and from left field that it would take an entire year to address all the misconceptions they have about science. It's reached a point where people have the analytical potential, but lack the basic fundamental content to base their conclusions on any meaningful analysis.

It's hard to argue that process and content are equivalent in terms of necessity but it goes too far to allow ideas like intelligent design or the flat earth society to be taught in science class. First of all, it's NOT science because they lack empirical experimental evidence. As a nation, to discuss the possibility of including these pseudosciences into a science class is a tell-tale sign that our nation has retrogressed towards ignorance.

Rather than spending the time to research and come up with a rational explanation based on data, we've resorted to falling for the explanation that has the least strings attached. So rather than going through the research yourself and increasing your knowledge on a subject, people are content with allowing a broad unproven explanation of nature suffice. It's academic laziness.

I have my reservations about teaching science to urban youth. I feel that there's not enough of an emphasis on science as a venue for future study. Students generally enter my class with the notion that science is an impossibility to pursue as a career, so why bother? It's debatable whether or not it's necessary for these kids to be held to a science standard since many other states don't require students to pass a standardized science test to get their high school diploma.

The movie "Idiocracy" comes to mind where as the average American becomes increasingly ignorant, so do future generations. The ones who have the knowledge are being outnumbered by the ignorant majority. I'm just waiting for farmers to start watering their crops with Gatorade to provide the crops with all the wonderful electrolytes that all living things need to grow and photosynthesize at their best.

I feel like we're reaching that point where average Americans are becoming that ignorant as to believe a 30 second commercial over performing their own sound research and exercising skepticism. Just look at how much advertising there is for these pharmaceutical companies that make billions on pills that fix one problem but create several others. Some treatments have side effects that are more excruciating than the original condition you are treating!

It bothers me that there's just so much that Americans should know before they make quick, uninformed decisions on issues like cloning, stem-cell research, the connection between vaccinations and autism, and the importance of genetic studies on bears in Montana.