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By Root 2095 0

Official’, reads one newspaper headline: ‘We Stink in Science’. In tests of average 17-year-olds in many world regions, the US ranked dead last in algebra. On identical tests, the US kids averaged 43% and their Japanese counterparts 78%. In my book, 78% is pretty good - it corresponds to a C+, or maybe even a B-; 43% is an F. In a chemistry test, students in only two of 13 nations did worse than the US. Britain, Singapore and Hong Kong were so high they were almost off-scale, and 25% of Canadian 18-year-olds knew just as much chemistry as a select 1% of American high school seniors (in their second chemistry course, and most of them in ‘advanced’ placement programmes). The best of 20 fifth-grade classrooms in Minneapolis was outpaced by every one of 20 classrooms in Sendai, Japan, and 19 out of 20 in Taipei, Taiwan. South Korean students were far ahead of American students in all aspects of mathematics and science, and 13-year-olds in British Columbia (in western Canada) outpaced their US counterparts across the board (in some areas they did better than the Koreans). Of the US kids, 22% say they dislike school; only 8% of the Koreans do. Yet two-thirds of the Americans, but only a quarter of the Koreans, say they are ‘good at mathematics’.

Such dismal trends for average students in the United States are occasionally offset by the performance of outstanding students. In 1994, American students at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong achieved an unprecedented perfect score, defeating 360 other students from 68 nations in algebra, geometry and number theory. One of them, 17-year-old Jeremy Bern, commented ‘Maths problems are logic puzzles. There’s no routine - it’s all very creative and artistic.’ But here I’m concerned not with producing a new generation of first-rate scientists and mathematicians, but a scientifically literate public.

Sixty-three per cent of American adults are unaware that the last dinosaur died before the first human arose; 75 per cent do not know that antibiotics kill bacteria but not viruses; 57 per cent do not know that ‘electrons are smaller than atoms’. Polls show that something like half of American adults do not know that the Earth goes around the Sun and takes a year to do it. I can find in my undergraduate classes at Cornell University bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

Because of science fiction, the educational system, NASA, and the role that science plays in society, Americans have much more exposure to the Copernican insight than does the average human. A 1993 poll by the China Association of Science and Technology shows that, as in America, no more than half the people in China know that the Earth revolves around the Sun once a year. It may very well be, then, that more than four and a half centuries after Copernicus, most people on Earth still think, in their heart of hearts, that our planet sits immobile at the centre of the Universe, and that we are profoundly ‘special’.

These are typical questions in ‘scientific literacy’. The results are appalling. But what do they measure? The memorization of authoritative pronouncements. What they should be asking is how we know - that antibiotics discriminate between microbes, that electrons are ‘smaller’ than atoms, that the Sun is a star which the Earth orbits once a year. Such questions are a much truer measure of public understanding of science, and the results of such tests would doubtless be more disheartening still.

If you accept the literal truth of every word of the Bible, then the Earth must be flat. The same is true for the Qu’ran. Pronouncing the Earth round then means you’re an atheist. In 1993, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, issued an edict, or fatwa, declaring that the world is flat. Anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in God and should be punished. Among many ironies, the lucid evidence that the Earth is a sphere, accumulated by the second-century Graeco-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus,