SPACE.com columnist Gentry Lee is a noted space-systems engineer, TV producer and SF author. This month, he considers the widespread problem of science illiteracy.

On a recent transcontinental flight, my seatmate was an affable, articulate international businessman from New York. During the first half of the trip we talked about a wide variety of topics, ranging from the attempts of the Federal Reserve to steer the American economy, to a comparison of the best California and French wines, to the almost insurmountable challenges facing Wahid’s government in Indonesia. The depth and breadth of the man’s knowledge and insight was truly impressive.

In our increasingly complex world, Gentry Lee laments the lack of science education that makes it difficult for even educated people to understand how scientists can confirm that this Martian meteorite is really from Mars.

That night in my hotel room I struggled with a disquiet that I had often experienced before. How can it be, I asked myself again, that in this world so dominated by scientific and technological issues, our society continues to define literacy in such narrow terms, and permits high school and even college graduates to be so woefully uninformed about the fundamentals of science?

Before I fell asleep I remembered a dinner party in the summer of 1964, when I had just finished my graduate work at MIT and was working as an intern at the General Motors Research Laboratories in Warren, Michigan. The host for the party was Dr. Robert Herman, the laboratory director. Dr. Herman was an exceptional scientist, an accomplished musician, and an all-around renaissance man. The evening was full of lively discussion, mostly political, for the nation was in the throes of the Johnson versus Goldwater election and everyone had a strong opinion about one or both of the candidates. What I remember best from the evening, however, was a statement that Dr. Herman made to me at the conclusion of a short, private conversation about my future career. "In the second half of the 20th century," he said, "a person who knows nothing but science is a bore, but a person who knows no science is ignorant."

Studies show that between eighty and ninety percent of American adults could not pass a simple test of knowledge based on that minimum set of concepts.
     

In the 36 years since that dinner party science and technology have become even more important in our society. Yet it is still true today that the vast majority of the people in North America, including many of our putative leaders, have little or no knowledge of science, or any real understanding of its methods. Recently there have been several excellent attempts to define a minimum set of important scientific concepts that, taken together, might be used as a measure of overall science literacy. Studies show that between 80 and 90 percent of American adults could not pass a simple test of knowledge based on that minimum set of concepts. To me this is a frightening statistic.

My non-scientific friends and associates dismiss my concern that widespread science illiteracy is a significant problem in our society. They quickly agree that such topical illiteracy does indeed exist, but they do not see why I am worried about it. These people hasten to point out that the best of our scientists are without equal anywhere in the world, and that our recent record of scientific and technological innovation is unmatched in history. "Besides," one smug politician said to me several months ago, after I gave a talk on the scientific controversy surrounding the global-warming debate, "we don’t really need to understand all that gobbledygook ourselves. We just need to know the key issues and where we can go to have our questions answered."

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There are other reasons why our society would benefit immensely from a commitment to a major increase in science literacy. In the new global civilization, there is ample evidence that competence in scientific and technological disciplines will be a key parameter in distinguishing between those nations and societies that achieve and/or sustain economic health and those that do not. Most of the new jobs of the 21st century will be in fields that are related to science and technology. Having most of our work force at least not uncomfortable with top-level scientific concepts will clearly strengthen our ability to compete in the global marketplace.

Gentry Lee is recommending the creation of a parallel liberal-science course structure that would teach about, for example, the planets in our solar system.

Since science is as much about a way of thinking as it is about results, this liberal-science structure would also teach, by example, the epistemology of the scientific method. The history of science would be taught as a series of exciting detective stories, and would include the blind alleys entered by some of the world’s great minds. Even the least mathematical student would learn to appreciate that experiment follows hypothesis, and that there are always three possible outcomes to the experiment: Either the hypothesis was correct or it was incorrect, or the experiment was not designed in such a way as to conclude unambiguously that the hypothesis was correct or incorrect.

I have suggested the creation of a secondary school and university liberal-science curriculum to many educational groups over the past five years. Always, I am forcefully reminded of the terrible lack of qualified science teachers, at all levels, and of the difficulty of even maintaining a satisfactory level of training for those individuals who will pursue scientific and technological careers. How do I propose to find people who can teach these general liberal-science courses to the non-scientists?

There is no straightforward, standard answer to the question. It won’t be easy to achieve a huge increase in science literacy by applying existing techniques. But I believe the problem is tractable. If we stop thinking that teaching must always be done by a select group of individuals who have acquired the proper credentials, and if the society acknowledges that overall science literacy is an issue that must be addressed, a solution will be found. In my experience, many of the best-qualified people to teach the kinds of liberal-science courses I am recommending have never worked full-time in education. They have spent their lives doing science, or have acquired the requisite knowledge as a result of their own innate curiosity. I believe they would gladly respond to the challenge if the society removed some of the bureaucratic restrictions to their participation in the educational process.

When I was a young student, I heard a quotation attributed to the pioneer Texas educator, Mirabeau B. Lamar. "Education is the guardian genius of democracy," Mr. Lamar reportedly said. Today, as a new century begins, that statement seems more true than ever. Since virtually everyone acknowledges that the major changes in the years ahead will come from the fields of science and technology, it could be said that only a scientifically literate populace can properly guard the evolution of our democracy.