Just the other day, I was thinking back to the things we read and studied in junior high school and high school in the sixties. I remember reading authors like Steinbeck, Hawthorne, and Faulkner in the eighth grade! I couldn't imagine that today!
I have been quite aware that the standard of education has been going steadily downhill for decades now. We've all seen the studies throughout the years, college freshmen not able to fill out the states on a map etc....I was wondering where this was all going to lead us as a nation. A new Gallup poll released this week gives a disturbing snapshot of where we stand collectively as a nation....I warn you it is not pretty. Proceed over the orange squiggly at your own risk....
Gallup released a poll this week....http://www.gallup.com/... showing that 42% of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. That's nearly half of the American population! No wonder it is so hard to break through all the noise surrounding climate change! With that kind of scientific illiteracy floating around, trying to save the planet would seem a daunting task indeed.
As C.J. Werleman says at alternet..http://www.alternet.org/...
It gets much worse. More than two-thirds of Americans, according to surveys conducted by the National Science Foundation, are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity. Nine out of ten don't understand radiation and what it can do to the human body, while one in five adults believes the sun revolves around the earth
Werleman points the finger at two causes for this scientific illiteracy,
America remains scientifically ignorant for two reasons : the resurgence of fundamentalist religon during the past 40 years, and secondly the low level of science education in American elementary and secondary schools, as well as many tertiary colleges
I love these Republican politicians who start a sentence by saying, " I am not a scientist but," and then go on to expouse some drivel like carbon dioxide is actually good for the planet becasue we exhale it anyway.
We have some very serious , educated decisions to make in the next few years that will mean life or death for this planet. It is imperative that we makes them from a serious and educated platform.