TechBlog

But as science has advanced, it has gone far beyond the immediately sensed world. It is now a world filled with dark matter in space, x-rays, gamma-rays, ultra violet light, DNA, genes, chromosomes, and bacteria that live in and around us in staggering numbers. We can’t detect these directly, yet we feel the consequences of all of them. We are also now bombarded by information on wars, acts of terror, climate change and global warming, devastating storms, fuel shortages, emerging infections, flu pandemics, HIV, stem cells, animal cloning, genetically modified plants, and now the possibility of synthetic life forms, all while trying to cope with complexities of our daily lives. It is no great surprise then that there is a global resurgence of fundamentalism, a desire to get back to what appeared to be a simpler time, and a time when our primary senses and simple rules appeared to determine our life outcomes.

But I believe such a view is both simplistic and dangerous because it avoids the issues we need to face.

Our planet is in crisis, and we need to mobilise all of our intellectual forces to save it. One solution could lie in building a scientifically literate society in order to survive.

While we share most of our senses with the rest of the animal world, we have a most unique and exciting evolutionary development - our brain. It provides us the ability to think, to reason, to predict and ponder the future. It enables us to ask questions and gives us the extraordinary capability to take over our own evolution by building complex tools that extend human capabilities millions of times further than would happen even with another billion years of evolution.

To begin the process of change we need to start with our children by teaching them in place of memorisation, to explore, challenge, and problem solve in an attempt to understand the world around them, and most especially the world they cannot “see” or feel directly. Perhaps, we can also start by changing the way we teach science in our schools.

Many studies continue to relay sobering facts about the state of our science and math education in both the United States and the United Kingdom. A recent study compared math and science scores of 12 to 13-year-olds from each US state to their counterparts in both the developed and developing world. While it conveyed some good information, namely that the US and UK are doing better than in previous years, it still showed that compared to countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and China even the best US states and England still lag behind. The good news for England however, is that you’ve outperformed the US in science scores. This might be due in part to the fact that half of all US citizens believe that humans coexisted with dinosaurs, or the 25% who don’t know the Earth revolves around the sun, and the 58% who cannot calculate a 10% tip on a restaurant bill. With this poor state of basic knowledge, how can we hope to survive the ever growing complexities of modern life?

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