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Any high-school graduate can clearly recall sitting in physics class learning about Bernoulli's principle, or the chemistry lab when the class synthesized aspirin, but almost none apply either of these after high school. For 50 years, Americans have equated a high-school curriculum rich in hard sciences with our national success and well-being. But while physics, chemistry, and biology have their places in elementary education and college curricula, they are in fact a burden on our resource-strapped high schools.

To alleviate the problem, high schools should decrease their emphasis on hard science, shifting resources instead to "soft" sciences such as anthropology, psychology, and sociology--all methods of understanding the world that are easier and cheaper to teach and, more important, that are immediately applicable for everyone.

After all, students who wish to seriously pursue science are going to do the bulk of their work in college and graduate schools anyway (how many patents come out of high-school chemistry labs versus Ph.D. seminars?). Students with financial and intellectual ability will almost certainly enroll in college, where undergraduate science courses will give them plenty of opportunity to discover their previously unknown desire to cure cancer; few future scientists will be lost by cutting back on high-school science labs. We have little reason to spend vast educational resources foisting watered-down chemistry, biology, and physics on everyone. But soft sciences such as anthropology, psychology, and sociology, which draw on the hard sciences, offer all students knowledge that is immediately relevant and touches on some of the deepest problems in American society.

Of course, most Americans believe that science in the U.S. is in such a disastrous decline that we should teach all high-school students more of it. A recent Pew survey found that only 17 percent of Americans view our science as the best in the world, and 26 percent see it as only average. Yet 49 percent of U.S. scientists, who perhaps know better, say American science is indeed the best in the world. In fact, the reality of our scientific standing is the near opposite of public perception: we are stronger than ever.

Worries that America is slipping in high-level innovation have been around since the 1950s, when we saw scientific progress as a primary front in the Cold War and crucial to our very survival. The broadly held fear of a nuclear attack sublimated, as it did into so many areas of American life, into a generalized anxiety that without enough science education we would not -- could not -- win the space race or close the missile gap. The Cold War ended, but Americans' perception of science as crucial to competitiveness never did, nor did our perception that America was worrisomely behind.

Before World War II, American science was indeed poor. But the past 50 years have seen consistent and astounding growth. Since the 1960s, when cries that Russia was outpacing us in innovation were loudest, we have won more Nobel prizes in science (chemistry, physics, and medicine) than any other country. 



Since the 1970s, we have won more than half of all science Nobels -- no other country even comes close. In the 1990s, Americans were gripped with the certitude that Japan and Korea were outpacing us in science, yet in that decade we won two out of three science Nobels, whereas Japan won almost none in the 1990s, and about 5 percent this decade. Now the great menace is China, but that country has won only two science Nobels -- both in 1957.

But Nobels aren't our only yardstick. Several indexes that measure innovation rank the U.S. as the "most innovative" country in the world.

Of course, the primacy of our scientists says little about the 99 percent of Americans who are not scientists. It's true that every few years a survey comes out revealing that some embarrassingly high proportion of Americans believe that, say, the sun revolves around the Earth. There is no denying that basic scientific literacy in this country is lower than it could be and should be. But tests of scientific understanding do not accurately compare one country to another, and are skewed against the U.S.: 85 percent of Americans attend and graduate high school, thus opening themselves to testing on scientific literacy, but that number is significantly lower elsewhere -- about 15 percent in China, for instance.

That is, even though tested Americans score worse in science than tested Chinese, the fact is that only the top fraction of China's population is educated and thus tested. That's like comparing Yao Ming, who is 7-foot-6, to the average American man, who is 5-foot-9, and saying that all Chinese men are taller.

But high schools are not to blame for any deficit in American scientific literacy. If an American enters high school believing that the sun rotates around the Earth, the problem isn't with high schools. Basic scientific facts belong in elementary and junior high schools, and that is where they're taught.

Part of the problem with American scientific literacy, I think, is that science is taught in a vacuum: high-school students might study that mutation can occur in cellular mitosis, but the broader implications -- for example, that naturally occurring genetic drift helps explain why people from different parts of the world have different physical features -- are left out. Most of us have little use for the details of mitosis, whereas understanding genetic drift, not to mention the cultural forces that arise from that drift, has real-life applications. It is far more difficult to fear those who are different from ourselves when the causes of that difference can be readily explained.

Education affects everyone, but scientific breakthroughs and innovations are led by a tiny percentage of the population. Putting every high-schooler through years of scientific study just so that a one-in-a-million scientific genius will pop out isn't just unnecessary -- that genius will need to go to college and then graduate school anyway -- it's counterproductive. Because hard sciences are so much more expensive to teach (lab equipment is costly and teachers require more training), for every future Einstein, the other 99 percent of students end up consuming a great deal of school resources for disproportionately small gains. A soft-science class can teach the basics of science -- life evolves from other life, culture is an expression of human behavior, behavior is rooted in factors such as genetic makeup and learned habit -- within the far more applicable contexts of culture and behavior.

The scientists who wish to cure obesity or autism will need years of hard-science training, to be sure. But for the rest of us, the chemistry of lipid breakdown is less useful than the anthropology of diet (the pre-agrarian human diet of nuts, leaves, and fruits is still the healthiest because it's what we're designed for). Knowing the biology of inverse chromosomal reproduction as a cause of autism is less useful than understanding the psychology behind what makes daily life for you autistic neighbor so different. I'm not saying throw chemistry and biology out of high schools, but shift some of those oh-so-thin resources to cheaper, more practical, more immediately applicable soft sciences, and American engagement with the natural world will prosper.