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Science Ability Down in U.S. High Schools
An anonymous reader writes "According to the International Herald Tribune, a nationwide test has shown that the ability to reason scientifically is less well developed across the board for high schoolers. Fourth graders, ironically, are actually better at reasoning in the sciences now than they were ten years ago." From the article: "The drop in science proficiency appeared to reflect a broader trend in which some academic gains made in elementary grades and middle school have been seen to fade during the high school years. The science results come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a comprehensive examination administered in early 2005 by the Department of Education to more than 300,000 students in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and on U.S. military bases around the world."
With all of the nonsense about teaching garbage like Intelligent Design as science its no wonder kids abilies are going down the tubes. It isn't just the schools either, because they are going home or going to their friends places and getting bombarded with this innane fundamentalist drivel. I mean really, theology maybe, but this stuff is absolutely not science, it is purely psuedoscience...cuz you know...we have all that evidence that the world is only 6,000 years old that those non God fearing scientists just ignore. What ever...
Personally, if I were a supreme being creditied with creating all of existance, I would be pretty offended by some hairless monkeys insisiting that I am unable to create things in a complex fashion that they aren't capable of understanding.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
You've got an administration that runs in a religious pretext... what did you expect? A push for science? Another problem is mainstream media. Just spent a day counting how many times CNN mentions God or shows "news" on religious topics. You're dumbing down the population. God is a belief, and believing is not science. What you'll end up with is a population that explains things in the pretext of God and religion. Of course, it's easier to explain natural disasters like the Indian ocean earthquake/tsunami and hurricane Katrina with God instead of the scientific reasons why they happen.
The decline in science reasoning has nothing to do with the teaching of ID. There are declines everywhere! Ask a modern high school graduate some basic questions in math, history, grammar, government, etc. It will be more enjoyable if you bring a buzzer. But even then you may break out in tears over the future of American youth.
The decline has more to do with the fact that we don't hold anyone who enters or leaves a school to any standard whatsoever. We just assume that pouring more money into the schools will fix our lack of making students study. We have politicians on one side claiming that a HS diploma is a *right*, and doing everything they can defeat any program that would test prospective graduates, and on the other side we have teachers unions who force local school districts to retain every teacher regardless of how they perform (compare the number of firings in the New York City school district to any company of comparable size and education).
The last thing that the politicians and unions care about is education. Neither of them gain anything from that.
What's in the paper is what a broad section of people are interested in... i.e. what society deems important. Newspapers change to cover what a society views as important because that is what sells.
The point I've been trying to make is that society needs to revalue what it thinks is important or else it won't be a society for much longer.
When I was a kid, I wasn't in a sports team. What should I care what kids in sports teams do? But there they are in the city's paper, not the school's paper to parents with kids in sports teams.