Promoting scientific literacy

Dennis Bartels, executive director of the Exploratorium penned a very interesting op-ed piece in today's Chron:
Educating to Narrow the Engineer Gap
How to keep our scientific edge
The money quotes for me are:

I believe our primary goal must be to train the greatest majority of our citizens to be technically competent. Technical competency -- the critical analytical skills of mathematics and science -- is the key to job creation, to replace the jobs we are losing. These are not positions requiring terminal degrees.

and:

Universal science and technical literacy is as important for our economy as it is for our democracy. The democratization of scientific knowledge must remain our highest goal in funding and setting goals for our schools.

As one who spends a great deal of time reading about the intersection of science, policy, and education, I completely agree with him. The most important goal for our education policy must be to foster broad technical literacy, numeracy, and a solid grounding in the scientific process. Of course it is important to pursue the frontiers of science and engineering. Historically we have done very well at that and we must continue to support the policies and institutions that allow us to excel in that pursuit. But without a broad understanding and appreciation for that effort by society at large we will not be able to sustain that effort, nor successfully reap the benefits of the knowledge that accrues.

One of my favorite bloggers, Billmon, put a fine point on this in a post about Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth:

In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere – even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.

Our societal challenge is less about the advancement of knowledge and more about absorbing and applying that knowledge to our world, to our economy and our polity. It matters less if the team that discovers the next breakthrough in understanding autism or obesity or HIV or ... is American or English or Chinese. What matters is how we move forward and adapt our policies and institutions to benefit from that knowledge. That should be the focus of our educational policy, to ensure that all of our students acquire an appreciation for our world of understanding.