OFF TOPIC - The dumbing of America

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by garyaiki

The Director of Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School surveys Americans about scientific knowledge. 20% of adult Americans believe the Sun revolves around the Earth. 90% don’t know what radiation is. Two thirds don’t know DNA is the key to heredity. He calls the lower half of high school graduates an embarrassment.

These statistics are worthless without the questions. He, like everyone in the world, had an agenda to prove. Its quite easy to construct a question that could generate the desired result. You could quite conceivably come up with a question that you could get me, with an astronomy minor, to say something that when dumbed down for a newspaper article becomes "the sun goes round the earth!"

"Astronomically, does the sun rise in the eastern sky and set in the western sky?" Seems pretty straightforward doesn't it? Except "rise" and "set" are being used to imply motion of the sun rather than the rotation of the Earth. Suddenly people that didn't think it through the whole way (with the qualifier of "astronomically") are saying the sun goes around the Earth. And what were the possible answers to the question (let alone the question itself and the all important sample size)? Its very easy to conceive that such a survey was composed entire of "so when did you stop beating your wife?" type questions.

Plus there's always smarmy types like me. I'd have said that the sun goes round the Earth, relative to an observer on the Earth.

And there's just so much to know these days. And a lot of it is simply not useful to anyone that's not a specialist. I'm sure 100% of you are getting through your day just fine without knowing what percentage of static on your TV is cosmic background radiation. Or what the ratio of muons to magnetic monopoles in the universe is. Or what a Kerr singularity is. Or if a quark is charmed. Or what the spin of an given electron is.