Educators Must Accept The Difference Between `Doing' And `Using' Science

Scientific literacy constitutes the knowledge you need to understand public issues. It is a mix of facts, vocabulary, concepts, history, and philosophy. It is not the specialized stuff of the experts, but the more general, less precise knowledge used in political discourse. If you can understand the news of the day as it relates to science, if you can take articles with headlines about genetic engineering and the ozone hole and put them in a meaningful context--in short, if you can treat news about science in the same way you treat everything that comes over your horizon--then as far as we are concerned you are scientifically literate. This definition of scientific literacy is going to seem rather minimal, perhaps even totally inadequate, to some scholars. We feel very strongly that those who insist that everyone must understand science at a deep level are confusing two important but separate aspects of scientific knowledge. The fact of the matter is that doing science is clearly distinct from using science; scientific literacy concerns only the latter. There is no need for the average citizen to be able to do what scientists do. You don't have to know how to calculate the trajectory of an artillery shell or sequence a section of DNA to understand the daily news any more than you have to be able to design an airplane to fly in one. But the fact that you don't have to know how to design an airplane doesn't change the fact that you live in a world where airplanes exist, and your world is different because of them. In the same way, advances in fields like microelectronics and molecular biology will affect your life in many ways, and you need to have enough background knowledge to understand how these changes are likely to occur and what their consequences are likely to be for you and your children. You must be able to put new advances into a context that will allow you to take part in the national debate about them. Like cultural literacy, scientific literacy does not refer to detailed, specialized knowledge--the sort of things an expert would know. When you come across a term like "superconductor" in a newspaper article, it is enough to know that it refers to a material that conducts electricity without loss, that the main impediment to the widespread use of superconductors is that they operate only at very low temperatures, and that finding ways to remove this impediment is a major research goal in materials science today. You can be scientifically literate without knowing how a superconductor works at the atomic level, what the various species of superconductors are, or how one could go about fabricating a superconducting material. Intense study of a particular field of science does not necessarily make one scientifically literate. Indeed, it has been our experience that working scientists are often illiterate outside their own field of professional expertise. For example, we recently asked a group of 24 physicists and geologists to explain to us the difference between DNA and RNA--a basic piece of information in the life sciences. We found only three who could do so, and all three of them did research in areas where this knowledge was useful. And although we haven't done an equivalent test on biologists--by asking them, for example, to explain the difference between a superconductor and a semiconductor--there is no doubt in our minds that we would find the same discouraging results if we did. The fact is that the education of scientists is just as narrowly focused as the education of any other group of professionals, and scientists are just as likely to be ignorant of scientific matters as anyone else. You should keep this in mind the next time a Nobel laureate speaks ex cathedra on issues outside his or her own field of specialization. Finally, one aspect of knowledge is sometimes lumped into scientific literacy but is actually quite different. You often see discussions of scientific literacy couched in terms of statements like "The average new employee has no idea how to use a computer" or "The average American is dependent on technology but can't even program a VCR to record when no one's home." These statements are probably true, and they undoubtedly reflect an unhappy state of affairs in American society. We would prefer, however, to talk of them in terms of technological, rather than scientific, literacy.... At the 1987 commencement of Harvard University, a filmmaker carried a camera into the crowd of gowned graduates and, at random, posed a simple question: "Why is it hotter in summer than in winter?" The results, shown in the film A Private Universe, were that only two of the 23 students queried could answer the question correctly. Even allowing for the festive atmosphere of a graduation ceremony, this result doesn't give us much faith in the ability of America's most prestigious universities to turn out students who are in command of rudimentary facts about the physical world. An informal survey taken at our own university shows results that are scarcely more encouraging. Fully half of the seniors who filled out our survey could not correctly answer the question "What is the difference between an atom and a molecule?" These results are not minor blemishes on a sea of otherwise faultless academic performances. Every university in the country has the same dirty little secret: We are all turning out scientific illiterates. The problem, of course, is not limited to universities. We hear over and over again about how poorly American high school and middle school students fare when compared to students in other developed countries on standardized tests. Scholars who make it their business to study such things estimate that fewer than 7 percent of American adults can be classed as scientifically literate. The numbers, then, tell the same story as the anecdotes. Americans as a whole simply have not been exposed to science in a way that communicates the knowledge they need to have to cope with the life they will have to lead in the 21st century.... Why be scientifically literate? A number of arguments can be made to convince you it's important. The first of these, the argument from civics, is essentially the one we have been using thus far. Every citizen will be faced with public issues whose discussion requires some scientific background, and therefore every citizen should have some level of scientific literacy. The threats to our system from a scientifically illiterate electorate are many, ranging from the danger of political demagoguery to the decay of the entire democratic process as vital decisions that affect everyone have to be made by an educated elite. The argument from aesthetics goes like this: We live in a world that operates according to a few general laws of nature. Everything you do from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed happens because of the working of one of these laws. There is intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction to be gained from seeing the unity between a pot of water on a stove and the slow march of the continents, between the colors of the rainbow and the behavior of the fundamental constituents of matter. The scientifically illiterate person has been cut off from an enriching part of life, just as surely as a person who cannot read. Finally, we come to the argument of intellectual coherence. It has become a commonplace to note that scientific findings often play a crucial role in setting the intellectual climate of an era. Copernicus's discovery of the heliocentric universe played an important role in sweeping away the old thinking of the Middle Ages and ushering in the Age of Enlightenment. Darwin's discovery of the principle of natural selection made the world seem less planned, less directed than it had been before; and in this century the work of Freud and the development of quantum mechanics have made it seem (at least superficially) less rational. In all of these cases, the general intellectual tenor of the times was influenced by developments in science. How, the argument goes, can anyone hope to appreciate the deep underlying threads of intellectual life without understanding the science that goes with it?... The beginning of a solution to America's problem with scientific literacy, both for those still in school and those whose formal education has been completed, lies in a simple statement: If you expect someone to know something, you have to tell him or her what it is. This principle is so obvious that it scarcely needs defending (although you'd be amazed at how often it is ignored within the halls of academe). It's obvious that if we want people to be able to understand issues involving genetic engineering, then we have to tell them what genetic engineering is, how DNA and RNA work, and how all living systems use the same genetic code. If we expect people to come to an intelligent decision on whether billions of dollars should be spent on a superconducting supercollider, we have to tell them what an accelerator is, what elementary particles are, and why scientists want to probe the basic structure of matter. But this argument, as simple as it seems, runs counter to powerful institutional forces in the scientific community, particularly the academic community. To function as a citizen, you need to know a little bit about a lot of different sciences--a little biology, a little geology, a little physics, and so on. But universities (and, by extension, primary and secondary schools) are set up to teach one science at a time. Thus, a fundamental mismatch exists between the kinds of knowledge educational institutions are equipped to impart and the kind of knowledge the citizen needs. So scientists must define what parts of our craft are essential for the scientifically literate citizen and then put that knowledge together in a coherent package. For those still in school, this package can be delivered in new courses of study. For the majority of Americans--those whom the educational system has already failed--this information has to be made available in other forms. Robert M. Hazen is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C.'s Geophysical Laboratory and Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. James Trefil is Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University.

Educators Must Accept The Difference Between `Doing' And `Using' Science

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Robert Hazen

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March 1991

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