Last summer, presumably in place of a humor column, the Washington Post ran a public-opinion survey sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. Among other things, the Post reported that only 39 percent of the people polled cared much about “botany”–but 77 percent expressed an interest in “plants and trees.”
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Scientific literacy isn’t advancing much, according to Miller’s numbers, which have changed little in 15 years. In a 1979 report for the National Science Foundation, Miller divided scientific literacy into three parts: an ability to define scientific inquiry, an understanding of the basic concepts, and an awareness of the broader issues involved. About 14 percent of Americans, he found, could define scientific inquiry adequately (as theory-building, or open-minded investigation of all evidence, or experiment and systematic observation). About half understood it well enough to recognize astrology as unscientific: that is, “eight percent [of those polled] thought astrology was very scientific; 34 said it was sort of scientific; and half recognized that it is not scientific at all.” As for basic scientific concepts, “about half the respondents thought they had a clear understanding of radiation, about a third thought they understood GNP, and only one in five claimed knowledge of the meaning of DNA.” People seemed to do best on issues: some 41 percent could list six alleged benefits or harms in controversies over food additives, nuclear power, and space exploration.
When he combined the three dimensions, however, Miller found that “only 7 percent of the respondents–primarily males, individuals over thirty-five, and college graduates”–had made the grade on all three. “Even among holders of graduate degrees, only a quarter could be called scientifically literate.” More sophisticated analysis (in a paper Miller presented this year to the American Association for the Advancement of Science) shows that when other factors are controlled it’s not gender that affects scientific literacy. It’s formal education.
In person Miller is brisk and imposing, a fast talker who doesn’t hesitate to explain things the long way around. Within minutes of our being introduced, he was telling me about the tenth essay in The Federalist, in which James Madison explained how to keep disagreeing factions from tearing the country apart. “You have crosscutting loyalties and multiple defining issues,” says Miller. “Today’s society is far more complex than Jefferson and Madison imagined–there were around 17,000 people in Boston in 1776! But it’s still true, in general, that societies with one single defining issue turn to bloodshed.”
Personal and cultural reasons–your life will be richer if you know that DNA is not a toxic chemical or “something criminals use.”
One reason the National Science Foundation keeps Miller’s hand on the public pulse is that folks inside the D.C. beltway want to know if the rest of us still trust scientists, even though we have only vague ideas of what they do. More to the point, they want to know if people beyond the beltway support continued federal funding for scientific research.
When students began to fail the new courses, school administrators–not teachers–faced a historic decision. They could either hang tough and upgrade elementary and junior-high courses or make science an elective. Most chose the course of least resistance. “Now just half of our high school graduates have taken chemistry, only 20 percent physics, only 9 percent calculus. You could say we’ve had a 30-year experiment in osmosis: is being in the same building with science classes enough?
