We need more money for teachers’ training and salaries, and for laboratories. But all across America, school-bond issues are regularly voted down. No one suggests that property taxes be used to provide for the military budget, or for agriculture subsidies, or for cleaning up toxic wastes. Why just education? Why not support it from general taxes on the local and state levels? What about a special education tax for those industries with special needs for technically trained workers?
American schoolchildren don’t do enough schoolwork. There are 180 days in the standard school year in the United States, as compared with 220 in South Korea, about 230 in Germany, and 243 in Japan. Children in some of these countries go to school on Saturday. The average American high school student spends 3.5 hours a week on homework. The total time devoted to studies, in and out of the classroom, is about 20 hours a week. Japanese fifth-graders average 33 hours a week. Japan, with half the population of the United States, produces twice as many scientists and engineers with advanced degrees every year.
During four years of high school, American students spend less than 1,500 hours on such subjects as mathematics, science and history. Japanese, French and German students spend more than twice as much time. A 1994 report commissioned by the US Department of Education notes:
The traditional school day must now fit in a whole set of requirements for what has been called the ‘new work of the schools’ – education about personal safety, consumer affairs, AIDS, conservation and energy, family life and driver’s training.
So, because of the deficiencies of society and the inadequacies of education in the home, only about three hours a day are spent in high school on the core academic subjects.
There’s a widely held perception that science is ‘too hard’ for ordinary people. We can see this reflected in the statistic that only around 10 per cent of American high school students ever opt for a course in physics. What makes science suddenly ‘too hard’? Why isn’t it too hard for the citizens of all those other countries that are outperforming the United States? What has happened to the American genius for science, technical innovation and hard work? Americans once took enormous pride in their inventors, who pioneered the telegraph, telephone, electric light, phonograph, automobile and airplane. Except for computers, all that seems a thing of the past. Where did all that ‘Yankee ingenuity’ go?
Most American children aren’t stupid. Part of the reason they don’t study hard is that they receive few tangible benefits when they do. Competency (that is, actually knowing the stuff) in verbal skills, mathematics, science and history these days doesn’t increase earnings for average young men in their first eight years out of high school, many of whom take service rather than industrial jobs.
In the productive sectors of the economy, though, the story is often different. There are furniture factories, for example, in danger of going out of business – not because there are no customers, but because so few entry-level workers can do simple arithmetic. A major electronics company reports that 80 per cent of its job applicants can’t pass a fifth-grade mathematics test. The United States already is losing some $40 billion a year (mainly in lost productivity and the cost of remedial education) because workers, to too great a degree, can’t read, write, count or think.
In a survey by the US National Science Board of 139 high technology companies in the United States, the chief causes of the research and development decline attributable to national policy were (1) lack of a long-term strategy for dealing with the problem; (2) too little attention paid to the training of future scientists and engineers; (3) too much investment in ‘defence’, and not enough in civilian research and development; and (4) too little attention paid to pre-college education. Ignorance feeds on ignorance. Science phobia is contagious.
Those in America with the most favourable view of science tend to be young, well-to-do, college-educated white males. But three-quarters of new American workers in the next decade will be women, nonwhites and immigrants. Failing to rouse their enthusiasm, to say nothing of discriminating against them, isn’t only unjust, it’s also stupid and self-defeating. It deprives the economy of desperately needed skilled workers.
African-American and Hispanic students are doing significantly better in standardized science tests now than in the late 1960s, but they’re the only ones who are. The average maths gap between white and black US high school graduates is still huge – two to three grade levels; but the gap between white US high school graduates and those in, say, Japan, Canada, Great Britain or Finland is more than twice as large (with the US students behind). If you’re poorly motivated and poorly educated, you won’t know much – no mystery there. Suburban African-Americans with college-educated parents do just as well in college as suburban whites with college-educated parents. According to some statistics, enrolling a poor child in a Head Start programme doubles his or her chances to be employed later in life; one who completes an Upward Bound programme is four times as likely to get a college education. If we’re serious, we know what to do.
What about college and university? There are obvious steps to take: improved status based on teaching success, and promotions of teachers based on the performance of their students in standardized, double-blind tests; salaries for teachers that approach what they could get in industry; more scholarships, fellowships and laboratory equipment; imaginative, inspiring curricula and textbooks in which the leading faculty members play a major role; laboratory courses required of everyone to graduate; and special attention paid to those traditionally steered away from science. We should also encourage the best academic scientists to spend more time on public education – textbooks, lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, TV appearances. And a mandatory freshman or sophomore (first- or second-year) course in sceptical thinking and the methods of science might be worth trying.
The mystic William Blake stared at the Sun and saw angels there, while others, more worldly, ‘perceived only an object of about the size and colour of a golden guinea’. Did Blake really see angels in the Sun, or was it some perceptual or cognitive error? I know of no photograph of the Sun that shows anything of the sort. Did Blake see what the camera and the telescope cannot? Or does the explanation lie much more inside Blake’s head than outside? And is not the truth of the Sun’s nature as revealed by modern science far more wonderful: no mere angels or gold coin, but an enormous sphere into which a million Earths could be packed, in the core of which the hidden nuclei of atoms are being jammed together, hydrogen transfigured into helium, the energy latent in hydrogen for billions of years released, the Earth and other planets warmed and lit thereby, and the same process repeated four hundred billion times elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy?
The blueprints, detailed instructions, and job orders for building you from scratch would fill about 1,000 encyclopedia volumes if written out in English. Yet every cell in your body has a set of these encyclopedias. A quasar is so far away that the light we see from it began its intergalactic voyage before the Earth was formed. Every person on Earth is descended from the same not-quite-human ancestors in East Africa a few million years ago, making us all cousins.
Whenever I think about any of these discoveries, I feel a tingle of exhilaration. My heart races. I can’t help it. Science is an astonishment and a delight. Every time a spacecraft flies by a new world, I find myself amazed. Planetary scientists ask themselves: ‘Oh, is that the way it is? Why didn’t we think of that?’ But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine. Given our manifest human limitations, what is surprising is that we have been able to penetrate so far into the secrets of Nature.
Nearly every scientist has experienced, in a moment of discovery or sudden understanding, a reverential astonishment. Science – pure science, science not for any practical application but for its own sake – is a deeply emotional matter for those who practise it, as well as for those nonscientists who every now and then dip in to see what’s been discovered lately.
And, as in a detective story, it’s a joy to frame key questions, to work through alternative explanations, and maybe even to advance the process of scientific discovery. Consider these examples, some very simple, some not, chosen more or less at random:
• Could there be an undiscovered integer between 6 and 7?
• Could there be an undiscovered chemical element between atomic number 6 (which is carbon) and atomic number 7 (which is nitrogen)?
• Yes, the new preservative causes cancer in rats. But what if you have to give a person, who weighs much more than a rat, a pound a day of the stuff to induce cancer? In that case, maybe the new preservative isn’t all that dangerous. Might the benefit of having food preserved for long periods outweigh the small additional risk of cancer? Who decides? What data do they need to make a prudent decision?