Hard to conceive a nation with plummeting educational test scores and increased denigration of science and scientists being able to maintain its global competitiveness. See my recent A Fading American Value: Public Education blog which provides the underlying data on our abysmal (and falling) ability to educate rising generations. Comparative international test scores put the United States 38th in math and 24th in science at the secondary school level. Corrected for inflation, generally, we are spending much less per student in our nation’s public schools than we did in the 1960s. Politicians are willing to spend tax dollars restricting teaching accurate history lessons and censoring textbooks, leaving teachers with plunging morale and legal risks… and severely overcrowded classrooms. Exactly how are we better off fighting culture wars in lieu of upgrading our educational standards?
Courts are also imposing their unscientific opinions to remove seriously tested and vetted prescription drugs (approved by the FDA) from circulation because they are used in ways that conflict with the relevant judge’s personal religious beliefs. We’ve even seen the President of the United States, during the pandemic, tout bogus medical treatments that could cause serious harm to individuals foolish enough to follow such advice.
In an unflinching wave of crass populism, we have witnessed red state after red state usurp long-standing medical expertise to insert religious doctrine to hamstring doctors and expose what was routine for decades as criminal activity. It is no surprise that many doctors and even more medical students and residents are seeking to move their practices or future practices out of such red states. Red state governors and legislators seem to have no inhibition in countering super-experienced healthcare professionals to garner populist votes.
Even as those selfsame legislators, including the entirety of our GOP congressional contingent, support cutting taxes for the mega-wealthy under a totally disproven “trickle down” economics policy, they equally delight in castigating educated “elites” and exceptionally experienced professionals as being “out of touch” with ordinary people. But elites are part of that richer American demographic. I suspect that when anti-elitists have a personal medical crisis, they do not defer to treatment by such inexperienced ordinary people… and quickly make an appointment with one of those “elitist” medical doctors.
All of these trends – mired in “tell the voters what they want to hear even if it is wildly false” – have generated a significant fall in national respect and confidence in science and scientists. Even as America’s very prosperity was defined and implemented based on our building cutting edge technology… created by those scientists. It is a toxic formula that can only serve to make us less competitive, more authoritarian and vastly less productive. We have genuine issues that we must face without hobbling our ability to deal with them. We must find new paths for economic growth based mostly on technological breakthroughs. Instead, we have and will have millions of unfilled STEM jobs necessary to generate that growth… because we denigrate science and scientists… and make the relevant education increasingly expensive. Other nations are smiling.
The June 23rd Associated Press lays in the underlying statistics: “Overall, 39% of U.S. adults said they had “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community, down from 48% in 2018 and 2021. That’s according to the General Social Survey, a long-running poll conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago that has monitored Americans’ opinions on key topics since 1972.
“An additional 48% of adults in the latest survey reported ‘only some’ confidence, while 13% reported ‘hardly any,’ according to an analysis of the survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research… The survey showed low confidence levels among Republicans as partisan gaps that emerged during the pandemic era have stuck around, said Jennifer Benz , the center’s deputy director… ‘It doesn’t look all that dramatic when you just look at the trends for the overall public,’ Benz said. ‘But when you dig into that by people’s political affiliations, there’s a really stark downturn and polarization.’
“Between surveys in 2018 and 2021, as the pandemic took hold, the major parties’ trust levels headed in opposite directions. Democrats reported a growing level of confidence in science in 2021 — perhaps as a “rallying effect” around things like COVID-19 vaccines and prevention measures, Benz said. At the same time, Republicans saw their confidence start to plummet.
“In the 2022 survey, Democrats’ confidence fell back to around pre-pandemic levels, with 53% reporting a great deal of confidence compared with 55% in 2018. But Republicans’ confidence continued its downward trend, dropping to 22% from 45% in 2018.
“Confidence in medicine has also grown more polarized since 2018. That year, Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to say they had high confidence. By 2022, though, Republicans’ confidence had fallen to 26%, while Democrats’ has remained about the same as it was before the pandemic, at 42%... Overall, 34% of Americans reported a great deal of confidence in medicine in 2022, compared with 39% before the pandemic.”
We’ve made education increasingly unaffordable, many Americans saddled with a lifetime of debt, but ignorance is exactly what we cannot afford as a competitive nation. And even among skeptics, parents still seem to want their children to receive an education. This is a push-pull dichotomy that has pretty much decimated upward mobility, crushing the American dream for so many. If we do not reverse course, the noble American experiment with democracy will indeed unravel. Do politicians need an uninformed electorate to get elected? Really?
I’m Peter Dekom, and as far as mankind has progressed, it has been based on those who have prioritized learning, truth and knowledge as core human values.
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