The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [159]
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