Have Americans Come Full Circle Since Sputnik?

Fifty years ago next month, the Soviet Union hoisted Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, into space and with it, the fears of millions of Americans that their nation’s scientific and technological legacy was being left behind in the rocket exhaust.

Sputnik’s successful launch forced many U.S. policymakers and educators to rethink the way the nation’s schools conducted business, namely in how they educated rising generations of Americans in two critical measures of national excellence — science and mathematics.

How successful were they? It depends on who you ask. In terms of maintaining a solid grasp of scientific principles, Americans have backslidden within few decades, and part of this — ironically — can be attributed to the success of the U.S. space program that emerged in response to Sputnik, according to one expert.

Is he right? Fifty years after Sputnik are Americans more apathetic than ever about science?

Granted, a concerted response followed in the wake of Sputnik. The U.S. space program was begun in earnest, eventually culminating in the successful landing of 12 human beings — Americans — on the moon. Also, to the space program’s enduring credit, it spawned all sorts of technological achievements that have enriched our earthbound lives in countless ways.

The nation’s educational establishment got busy too. In the view of one former Birmingham, Ala., black student contending with the effects of segregation and uneven school funding in the 1950s, it nonetheless marked a “time of incredible intensity and attention to science.”

But this again raises the question: Is American society any better grounded in scientific principles than before the launching of Sputnik?

One scientist harbors doubts. While the last few decades have been heady in terms of what this country has managed to achieve scientifically and technologically, the fact remains that a majority of Americans simply can’t “relate to science, statistics and to the amount of time it takes to carry out a real study.” Much of this, he believes, stems from apathy.

In fact, Dr. Jim Hairston, the Alabama Cooperative Extension System’s water coordinator and Auburn University professor of agronomy and soils, believes one of the greatest achievements of the Space Age — rapid advances in telecommunications technology — actually may have contributed to this apathy.

One of the most tangible achievements of the space program is advanced telecommunication technologies — technologies that have had a great deal to do with microcomputers, the Internet and cell phones all commonplace today. But that raises the question: Is there too much of it? Or, to phrase it another way, has this technology produced an explosion of information with which the vast majority of us are ill-equipped to deal?

It’s a question Hairston has raised on countless occasions with friends and colleagues. He believes it not only has produced an information overload but also is responsible for much of the apathy about science that prevails today.

“There is more information than ever before at our fingertips,” Hairston says, “But because of time constraints, most Americans have to be very selective in what they choose to learn, and unfortunately, science typically ranks low on the list of priorities.”

And the confusion is limited not only to new media such as the Web. Older forms of technologies, including movies, have contributed their share of confusion.

In fact, Hairston believes that movies and other forms of media have both sensitizing and desensitizing effects. Just as these media have been blamed for desensitizing people to violence, he believes some depictions have worked to sensitize people to nonexistent threats and, in rarer cases, to desensitize them to genuine threats.

Like any scientist, Hairston welcomes scientific and technological innovation, though he believes the welter of information available today through the explosion of media outlets continues to erode most Americans’ ability to put scientific and technical information into the proper perspective. But he doesn’t expect improvement to come any time soon.

One problem, as he sees it, is the widespread presumption among many, if not most, Americans that science simply should be treated like any other political debate in which a person forms an opinion after eliciting opinions from both sides of debate.

In most cases, he says, the end result is pseudoscience, and while pseudoscience is harmless in itself, it can have dangerous effects in cases where it influences public policy.

What can be done? Hairston doesn’t foresee any immediate solution other than a concerted effort and strategy among scientists to rebuild the scientific consensus that has been lost within the last few decades.

Posted by Jim Langcuster at September 25, 2007 03:36 PM