1 in 4 Americans Believe the Sun Revolves Around the Earth

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I think you're substituting ideology for reality. Islam is incompatible with science. Their only contributions to science have come from their conquest and assimilation of other cultures. In fact, rather than study artifacts for knowledge they delight in destroying them with fertilizer.

"NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go, that’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics.”

The odd thing about America is that non-scientists can dictate or lobby for what content goes inside your children's science textbooks. Religious pressure groups are lobbying for inclusion of creationism / intelligent design as legitimate science inside those textbooks. Apparently around half of Americans believe in creationism too; which doesn't surprise me considering a quarter of them also think the sun revolves around the earth. That people, who are so ignorant of science, can have an input regarding the contents of science textbooks just baffles me.

There was no budget line for spending on any such thing proposed by the WH or Congress. It was just a verbal carrot to encourage a certain region of the world to join the dozens of other nations who partner with NASA. Soft power projection has been a covert purpose of NASA since the start. We would not have gone to the Moon or built a space station with the Russians without that in mind.

On the one hand...Yikes! That doesn't speak well of American schools. On the other hand, European schools must be even worse according to the poll:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/02/16/1-i ... its-earth/

The far worse performance of Europeans doesn't seem to have penetrated the googleverse. However I am suspicious of both figures. I tried to find out exactly how this poll was conducted but was unable to. In the course of looking for that info, I found this information from the same article I linked above....



....so I guess my attempts to google the actual questions will be fruitless until that time, whenever it is. I am wondering about the actual questions because I wonder if the question was worded in such a way that a cursory reading/listening to the question could make you misunderstand it and give an answer that is not consistent with your actual knowledge.

I wonder this because I made a comparable mistake while googling. I am a fast typist but not an exactly accurate one. I am too fast for my own good and have to go back and correct a lot. While googling this subject I was quite surprised to look up at the screen and discover that I had typed "1 in 4 Americans don't know the sun revolves around the earth". How very silly of me! I certainly know what revolves around what. I remember getting outraged at the treatment of Galileo back when I was 9 or 10 and learned about him. By that age I had known the earth revolves around the sun for 3 or 4 years (I think- remember being very young and my Dad explaining it at a science museum exhibit). Yet I typed the opposite into the search engine until I looked up and corrected my mistake.

So I reserve judgement on the terrible knowledge base of Americans- and even more so of Europeans!-until after seeing the methodology. It may be that what they picked up was that a lot of people are very careless and answer too quickly before parsing the question properly.

Agreed. There's also the prankster factor: teenagers in particular, when given an anonymous poll, are known to pick the funniest answer rather than the one they honestly believe to be true. And we get the shocker headlines that 40% of high school seniors think a Barack Obama is a kind of mackerel.

40%+ of Americans believe that man was created as is by god. So there is a certain point of honor for some in denying science. They think the elites are trying to fork them over and deny Jesus. Christian geocentrics also still exist in the US but they are just a subset of creationists and I doubt they make up much of that 20%.

An average American does not have a lower IQ than an average person in most European countries. Thus, most Europeans are scientifically illiterate as well.

Why is it shocking? It's no accident that there has been a 30+ year attack on public education, and the advancement of junk science in the US. An uneducated and mis-informed populace is easier to manipulate and control.

Oh yes That too. I wonder what the methodology will reveal about the age spread of those polled. It doesn't say "1 in 4 high school students" but but including a large number of them could skew the results because of pranking. People my age rarely prank but do get careless because of doing things too quickly so that's what I thought of first. But if there were many teens polled, pranking could mess things up.

Yeah, I always messed with a polls I got just for the lulz. For instance, I once got a survey asking me about drug and alcohol use in high school. So I told them that I smoked crack and used crystal meth at least once a month. Dohoho, what a scandalous news story that probably made!

NoNoNoNo, EVERYBODY HAS IT WRONG!

Ya see, it all starts with our senses, without them we would be totally clueless and unaware.
THEREFORE I am the center of the universe, for none of you would exist without my senses.



Aside from that, when I first heard that report, I had to think to my self how many said otherwise just to be sarcastic or as a joke, its unreal in our day and age for so many to be so ignorant. some of those estimates have to be off (unless their adding in the tribal nations that still exist.)

I really hope people were just joking.

That's almost saying, 'sure, but the poor kids don't count.'
We need the brains of ALL of our kids, not just the rich ones, to be educated.

Whilst you may ultimately be right, I think your reasoning is faulty. Scientific literacy is not IQ.

I think I remember, from past polls, that the USA doesn't do much worse than Europe. Americans do slightly better there, Europeans do slightly better there... the exception, as I'm sure most people will be aware, is evolution, where Americans consistently do worse.

I'm not getting into the debate on it. I will say this though…it's a consequence of living in a democracy that values freedom of religion. Religious people DO have a vote, as does everyone else, scientists and irreligious people included, and everyone else in between and beyond. So the part that you might see as unfortunate is that people retain the ability to make up their own minds with regards to what they are willing to believe and what they are not willing to believe. You know I'm a religious person, and for me what little science I DO follow more informs my faith in the same way the Bible INFORMS my faith (informs, rather than dictates, what I believe). For example, I see the vastness of the universe as a reflection of the vastness of its Creator, and the intricacies of how life has developed over time as a reflection of the genius that put it all into motion.

I don't get my undies in a wad over it, nor do I pay attention, until "evidence" is cited that "disproves" my faith and the "discussion" on the matter is considered "closed." I'm no scientist, but my understanding of those who actively participate in it is that they never consider the dialogue closed on ANYTHING, and one of the very few things in my view that is NOT open to discussion is whether God exists at all--oh, and I don't claim that to be a "scientific" position, but I do challenge the ability of science to prove/disprove that. Once science does make faith claims, or rather anti-faith claims, I'm closed to those ideas because what is being "scientifically" claimed is not within the purview of science.

What believers are concerned about that seems to be giving you grief is that educational choices are being made FOR our children within the public system that strategically targets matters of faith. And since religious people have a justified concern for science dictating what their children should believe in opposition to how they are raised at home, any equitable science education necessarily address some of those things you vehemently dislike (creationism, ID, etc.). The way I was taught biology, to include evolution, etc., was with the mindset of "THEY say (x,y,z) and it is a necessary part of the curriculum…you have to make up your own mind about (x,y,z)."

I'm not aware that most children are taught that way, and I wasn't ever in a public school, but you unfortunately do have to take into account that parents have a say in how children are taught and can reflect their concerns for that in the way that they vote. Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight, but that I'm afraid is what you're running up against.

Science is not a democracy. If you want your children to be taught science, then let the scientists decide what belongs in the science classroom; if you don't want your children to be taught science, then keep them out of public schools because the public has an interest in most of our children being scientifically literate.