If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Yancey, 1816

Thinking is hard. Writing is hard because it requires thinking. Both thinking and writing involve time and concentration-commodities that these days are hard to come by. Sometimes it seems that nobody has time for, or even cares about, thinking-or for that matter concentrating on any single task. According to Steve Jobs, eBooks will fail because “people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year” (1). Presumably these people are busy viewing videos on their iPhones, listening to music on their iPods, driving their SUVs, or all three at once.

Next month is our summer reading issue, with reviews of more than a dozen books that would be valuable to read in your leisure time. But before you start on those books, I recommend Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason (2). Though not explicitly about chemistry or science, it has a lot to say about science, teaching, and public understanding.

Jacoby’s condemnation of “unreason” is much broader, but she specifically documents ignorance about science. America is the only developed country in which evolution by natural selection is not viewed as accepted, noncontroversial science. Jacoby refuses to accept religious fundamentalism as the sole reason, citing many non-fundamentalist dismissals of scientific consensus. She argues that ignorance of evolution, and worse, of science and its principles and modes of thought, are the main problem. In support she quotes NSF studies revealing that more than two thirds of Americans do not know that DNA is the key to heredity, 90% do not understand radiation, and 20% think the sun revolves around the earth. She also cites poor performance on examinations that compare U.S. students with those from other countries. A recent poll by the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry does nothing to contradict Jacoby-nearly half of Americans could not name any scientist as a role model for today’s youth (3).

Jacoby attributes lack of knowledge of science to “a stunning failure of American public schooling at the elementary and secondary levels”, but I think there is more to it than that. To a considerable degree intellectuals in general and scientists in particular have gotten too busy with their own pursuits to pay attention to maintaining the infrastructure undergirds science and its contributions to society. We scientists have not been as aggressive as we should, for example, in recruiting top students to careers in teaching at the K-12 level and providing such students with the scientific background they need to excite their students about science. Until both scientists and the general public begin to afford K-12 teaching the respect and importance that it deserves, we are likely to continue to spiral downward in quality rather than soar to new heights.

Can we do anything about this? In her final chapter, Jacoby suggests that the U.S. may have arrived at a teachable moment as a result of many failures of government policies that have ignored facts and scientific consensus. Jacoby argues that solutions to our problems will not be technological but rather must come from changing the way we think-and how much time we spend thinking. Jacoby wants politicians to provide leadership and tell us that we “have become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions”. This is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for politicians to do unless those of us in the trenches of the educational system help our students to learn how to think as scientists think, how to apply rational thought to everyday situations, and why doing this is crucial to a free society. In the words of Daniel Webster’s eulogy for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1826, our country was founded on the basis of “a newly awakened, and an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge throughout the community”. That is, the founders based a country on the spirit of science. We need to maintain that spirit when we teach science.

I encourage you to read Jim Roach’s Commentary (which also appears in this blog). Its title begins “Als Ik Kan”, Flemish words for “to the best of my ability”. Roach has resolved, and encourages all of us to resolve, to teach to the best of our ability and to motivate our students to learn and work to the best of their abilities. I encourage all who read this to serve as models of rational, scientific thinking and create learning environments in which our students are encouraged-even required-to apply rational thought to both science and their daily lives. Set aside some time to think quietly and carefully about this.

Literature Cited

1. Jobs, Steven P., quoted in the New York Times, January 21, 2008.

2. Jacoby, Susan The Age of American Unreason Pantheon Books: New York 2008.

3. Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago The State of Science in America, March 20, 2008; http://www.stateofscience.org/ (accessed April 2008).

Science versus Antiscience?