If people don't take science seriously, they'll be the ones who make political statements like "We spend too much money on fruit fly research, what a useless and meaningless line of research." Or, "Why do we spend millions of dollars studying worms when people die everyday from cancer and other degenerative diseases?"
The American public has no idea the significance of some of this research. And at this point, the academic gap is so great that the average American will NEVER fully understand the significance of the research that is conducted at these labs.
I still remember when Sarah Palin made her anti-science intentions known when she advocated the relinquishing of federal funds for research on Drosophila (one of the original model organisms that initiated our comprehensive understanding of genetics and molecular biology). Unbelievable.
The same is true with her former running mate, John McCain, when in 2 of the Presidential debates, he advocated the cutting of funding to advancing scientific expenditures (planetarium projectors and genetic research on bears in Montana). He admitted in the debates, "We spend $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. I don't know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue, but the fact is it was $3 million of our tax-payers money that has got to be brought under control." So why make such a statement if you don't understand it?! And "[Obama] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?" I was totally convinced that McCain would ruin science education in America if elected.
As much as I try to make the science interesting or to tell stories through the struggles of these great scientific minds, it's hard to believe that getting "better communicators" in the classroom will make any difference. If society doesn't support us on a political level and on an educational level, it won't matter what kind of science educator ends up in the classroom.
The mentality where people believe that "It doesn't matter what kids read as long as they're reading" is a terrible one. Allowing kids to read whatever fiction they want is what dulls a student's analytical abilities when it comes to reading something that actually means something in modern-day society (census data, blueprints, diagrams, etc.). If students can't read a short passage of non-fiction, handle raw data, organize data, identify bias, and find the trends in data then there are bigger problems at hand than whether or not a student can read all of the Harry Potter books.
Ask any ELA teacher if they regularly get students to read passages of non-fiction with the explicit purpose of developing their ability to draw evidence and support an argument. It DOESN'T happen. I regularly give students non-fiction passages and have noticed this trend that students can't separate fact from fiction in what they read. Students aren't taught to look at things from an objective perspective (if you're an ELA teacher, you can test this by polling your students: "Do you believe in magical powers? Elaborate or give an example."). They're always asked to find the symbolism, the character flaws, or to identify the climax of a story, but rarely investigate the historical or the scientific circumstances. Not that scientific illiteracy is the fault of the ELA department, but it would certainly help to have teachers of all departments emphasize the significance of diversifying what students read instead of this BS "Read whatever fiction you want and you'll succeed in life."
The average American doesn't have a cohesive and unified understanding of science (if you don't believe me, ask a Bronxite what mitosis and cancer have in common and how they're different). But it's not a matter of getting educated, it's about having the desire to understand rather than resort to the stupidity that the uneducated and outspoken majority seems to cling to.
This is a clip illustrating the mediocrity that we face in terms of educational policy, which feeds scientific illiteracy. Intelligent Design is NOT SCIENCE! The South Baptist Theological Seminary has NO SAY IN A SCIENCE CURRICULUM! What's sad is that I don't think the commentator understood the reference to the Galapagos Islands.
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