On today's episode of Bloggingheads, fellow Discover blogger Chris Mooney and I talk about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future
, the new book he has co-authored with his co-blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum. We definitely have our differences, or different emphases, but I hope our argument ended up being enlightening, rather than demolishing. One big difference was over high school science education. I just can't see any long-term solution that is superior to doing a better job of teaching high school kids about science and getting them to feel that it's part of their lives. Part of this involves getting really good teachers out into all schools, not just the ones surrounded by McMansions. Part of this involves a program like the one I mentioned in the bloggingheads talk, called FIRST, which was developed by Dean Kamen as a kind of robot-building Superbowl. And guess what? Kamen actually fills ...
