Is Science Education in Serious Trouble?

Photo: Rhett Allain. Experimental setup to measure Avogadro’s number. This picture doesn’t really have anything to do with this post.

We have a problem with science education, and it seems like it’s getting worse every year.

In pretty much every university for every undergraduate degree program, students have to take a science course. I think even three science courses is very common. But why? Why does a student majoring in history, or economics, or even business? The answer is that a college degree isn’t about job training, it’s about human growth. Students take classes (and have other experiences) that help them become more complete humans. So, part of this means that students need to understand the nature of science. That’s why they take science courses (they also need to appreciate art and literature and other stuff too).

OK, so we have students taking science courses. Where is the problem? Well, one problem is that there are some topics in which a non-zero percentage of the student population just doesn’t believe some main ideas. I’m going to explain this looking at some of these ideas (in physical science).

Age of the Earth and Universe

One of my first teaching positions was at a religiously affiliated college and I had an introduction to astronomy course (for non-science majors). I was worried about getting to topics regarding the age of the universe — since I assumed there were some students held a fundamentalist belief…