I love my mother very much. As cliché as it is, she’s been a source of inspiration to me for my entire life. And despite her lack of scientific training, my mother has always pushed me to be interested in science and technology. Just as she always made sure she was the one to use power tools in front of myself and my three sisters, my mother and father always told us that daughters of scientists were more likely to become scientists themselves (my father is a nuclear physicist). I have no idea of the accuracy of that claim, but it’s stuck with me, especially when I consider the path my life might have taken had she and my father not worked to make my sisters and me love science and math.
My math ability outstripped my mother’s in about sixth grade. She’s never been the one to whom I’ve gone for help with homework––I ask my father about physics, my older sisters for chemistry and English, my friends about math. But occasionally, my mother and I will have a conversation about science. She’ll come up to me and say, “I learned the coolest thing today! Did you know that when radioactive materials decay, they’re actually emitting particles, so they change from one element into another?!” I smile, and say, yes, isn’t that neat? And then we talk about half-lives for a bit. My mother is an intelligent woman––she holds a Masters in Industrial Labor Relations from Cornell, and is one of the most educated and accomplished pre-school teachers I know. Her students learn things I didn’t until I was twice their age, and I am constantly impressed by her knowledge of young children’s cognitive and physical development. But she has no scientific background. What my mother does have, however, is a sense of scientific inquiry, as well as experiencing the joy that comes as a result of scientific investigation.
I am often surprised by how little scientific detail my mother knows or understands––after all, I come from an environment where I and my peers are constantly steeped in science and technology, where as sophomores, we can make jokes about ‘olefins’ and expect all of our peers to understand us. Yet my mother is more informed and better educated than the average American––in fact, she often serves as a stark reminder of how low our educational standards can be. And those lax educational standards are terrifying.
It is because of those educational standards that books like Michael Crichton’s State of Fear do so well. Crichton has enough of a background, and has done enough research to sound entirely plausible––he even has graphs and scientific citations! How is someone who has at most an extremely limited grasp of biology, chemistry and Algebra II supposed to find fault with Crichton’s pseudoscience? If I, a student in the top science and technology high school in the country, can feel my convictions waver when reading Crichton’s extremely persuasive writing, how is an under-educated stay-at-home mother in Texas supposed to look at him critically?
The issue isn’t just that America doesn’t have enough scientists and engineers. The issue is that those individuals who don’t pursue scientific and technical careers, who become English teachers, politicians, and accountants, aren’t inculcated in the ‘proper’ though processes––they don’t learn to think like a critical scientist, and as a result, they miss out on understanding how science works. Thus, the commercials which claim dust mops have been “scientifically proven” to be X% more effective at cleaning floors, and thus the persistence of often dangerous folk remedies, because it ‘worked for my grandmother one time.’ I often say that “the plural of anecdote is not data,” but that is a concept which few people seem to understand.
The philosophy of science, of knowledge gained from repeated observations which can be shown to be wrong, is a concept vital to the well-being of our nation. Policy makers must be able to understand the attitude which informs the science upon which their policies rest, while voters must equally be able to question and condemn those politicians’ decisions. Educating all children about science and scientific processes is absolutely vital; if not because a certain literacy, and point of understanding is important for intellectual well-roundedness and well-being, then because our nations’ politics and futures rest upon our understanding and mastery of science.
