Beating That Dead Horse….

I know, I know….this blog has become a venue for breast-beating and hand-wringing and other elements of my increasingly curmudgeonly analysis of our collective civic IQ. (Ironically, if the people who comment here are representative of those who read my rants, they don’t need the lectures. I guess it’s the ultimate “preaching to the choir.”)

Still.

A reader sent me a link to an NPR story that makes a really important point about the content of civic knowledge.

According to the National Council for Social Studies, the goal of social studies is to promote civic competence, or the knowledge and intellectual skills to be active participants in public life. Yet, engaging with the most complex public issues of our time—biodiversity, climate change, water scarcity, obesity, energy, and HIV/AIDS—also requires a deep understanding of the scientific process.

I’d settle for a cursory understanding of what science is. And isn’t.

Turn on your television, or even worse, read the letters to the editor in your local paper, and you will encounter–ad nauseum–mindless repetition of the “evolution is just a theory” meme, displaying total ignorance of how the use of the term by scientists differs from its use in everyday language. Ask students what falsification means, and you will get blank stares.

Ignorance of the most basic definition/methodology of science may not have been problematic back when most Americans were still on the farm, and the policy issues we faced did not require a working understanding of things like net neutrality, climate change, the human genome, etc. It is more than problematic now.

And scientifically illiterate voters have just empowered a bunch of aggressively scientific illiterate politicians to decide those policies and make those decisions.

It’s truly terrifying.

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