Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

No Such Thing as a Dumb Question
unjust, it's also stupid and self-defeating. It deprives the economy
of desperately needed skilled workers.
African-American and Hispanic students are doing significantly
better in standardized science tests now than in the late 1960s, but
they're the only ones who are. The average maths gap between
white and black US high school graduates is still huge - two to
three grade levels; but the gap between white US high school
graduates and those in, say, Japan, Canada, Great Britain or
Finland is more than twice as large (with the US students behind).
If you're poorly motivated and poorly educated, you won't know
much - no mystery there. Suburban African-Americans with
college-educated parents do just as well in college as suburban
whites with college-educated parents. According to some statistics,
enrolling a poor child in a Head Start programme doubles his
or her chances to be employed later in life; one who completes an
Upward Bound programme is four times as likely to get a college
education. If we're serious, we know what to do.
What about college and university? There are obvious steps to
take: improved status based on teaching success, and promotions
of teachers based on the performance of their students in standardized,
double-blind tests; salaries for teachers that approach
what they could get in industry; more scholarships, fellowships
and laboratory equipment; imaginative, inspiring curricula and
textbooks in which the leading faculty members play a major role;
laboratory courses required of everyone to graduate; and special
attention paid to those traditionally steered away from science.
We should also encourage the best academic scientists to spend
more time on public education - textbooks, lectures, newspaper
and magazine articles, TV appearances. And a mandatory freshman
or sophomore (first- or second-year) course in sceptical
thinking and the methods of science might be worth trying.
The mystic William Blake stared at the Sun and saw angels there,
while others, more worldly, 'perceived only an object of about the
size and colour of a golden guinea'. Did Blake really see angels in
the Sun, or was it some perceptual or cognitive error? I know of
no photograph of the Sun that shows anything of the sort. Did
Blake see what the camera and the telescope cannot? Or does the
309