US Students are Ranked 21st In Science Out of 30...
industrialized nations. The TOP US students ranked 25th out of 30 in math when compared to other industrialized nations top students.
http://broadeducation.org/about/crisis_stats.html
I posted a request for information that would refute a creationist speaker that is coming to lecture at my son's university. For the most part I received a lot of useful stuff. And, of course, I also got the smattering of 'why are you doing his homework for him' posts. Those don't bother me so much other than that I felt like I needed to defend my really very smart, very motivated son. He is on full scholarship to Clemson, part of which is made up of his Palmetto Fellow scholarship. To win this particular scholarship he had to have a combination of class rank, SAT scores and GPA. He started as a Physics major and switched to Math and Education this year. He is a smart kid who has never gotten a whole lot of help in school from me (in the interests of full disclosure, I do help him occasionally with writing projects). I think he will laugh when he sees the comments about 'doing his homework for him' since we have never believed in that, even before his homework got so complicated that we don't stand a chance of helping him. So, the folks that think I am some controlling mother who is doing his research for him...eh.
The ones that got me were the few who said that he shouldn't either bother refuting the pseudo science or that he should even 'make an effort to understand where the creationists and Young Earthers are coming from' since there are 'so many of them'.
We have a serious education problem in this country. More and more religion is working its way into public schools. Georgia put the stickers on their science books. In the SC school that both of my children attended, every year there were kids who just got up and walked out whenever evolution is mentioned in science class. And I am not talking one or two. States dotted all over the country are trying to work intelligent design into the curriculum. Yeah, there are A LOT of people who believe this stuff. There are a lot of racists, too, and numbers don't make them right, either.
My son and I both feel that just standing politely on the side while pseudo scientists make further inroads into the already fairly pathetic understanding of science in this country is not productive. He may or may not sway a single person there, but he can make his voice heard. He can stand up and let them know that not everyone who heard the lecture believes that the speaker has a valid point. I worry that while we are all busy being polite, that what we are actually doing is validating these beliefs. I don't think for my son; he has proven he is more than capable of that himself. But in this, he agrees with me.