We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
I have three boys. And I wanted to make sure it connected with them and then those guys who grew up like me, in environments like me.And then I knew something about science that your New York Times reader would be interested in. So I was thinking about it in multiple ways: I'll connect with the people who grew up like me first, and then the New York Times reader will be interested in the science because it's so good and they want to be "in the know."
My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan.
One thing that was very important to me was that I felt comfortable in the lab from being very, very small. I knew that that's where I belonged, and I could fix things and move things. And no matter how many classrooms I went into where I was the only girl in the physics class or whatever, I never questioned the fact that I didn't belong there.
I don't know, but I think it's quite possible that the more science you teach kids in school the more it turns them off, so I don't know. I mean you never can tell which way it will go.
The simplest science book is over my head.
Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates say they’re not interested in a career or a college major involving science, technology, engineering or math…
Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.
One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we've taken this incredibly interesting subject - how the universe works - and made it boring.
As far as I'm concerned, raising the bar or encouraging kids in large numbers to be interested in science, I can't think of anything I'd rather see happen.
When it comes to art and science, people don't like a lot of either. Instead of being open to it, they're closed off about it.
If everybody has to take biology and chemistry, they can take computer science. Computer science is a more useful skill right now than a lot of other things that people are learning at school.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.
I wish I watched movies like 'Hidden Figures' when I was a kid, and maybe I would've taken science classes super seriously, because I saw myself.
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
There seems to be a concern about whether the public appreciation of science has eroded to a point where it has removed science from public debate and public decision making. Whether the public has come to regard evidence as optional.
Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.
Bill Nye the Science Guy' was awesome.
For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.
We are really battling, today in the U.S., keeping science education in the forefront at the elementary level, and that's where the research shows that kids get interested.
We want kids to think that they can think about science. They don't need to just play soccer.
We don’t need 1 million nuclear scientists, but we do need 100 million citizens who are knowledgeable about how science affects their lives.
Almost everyone shuts down when science becomes too technical; you've got to infuse it with entertainment and storytelling to make it effective. From high school on, science is taught in a very dry manner, which isn't as potent.
We look at science as something very elite, which only a few people can learn. That's just not true. You just have to start early and give kids a foundation. Kids live up, or down, to expectations.
