Forget STEM and all the hoopla about fewer people going into the science field – let’s look at the science every US citizen needs to understand – can we just teach that much science successfully?

Not ‘do we’ – ‘CAN WE’? Because the reality is, real science is really boring. It’s not particularly difficult – elementary kids can grasp the basics and high schoolers should be able to master the principles. If you can keep them awake long enough because science is so easy that it can be boring.

You see, science is just a method.

Fancy term is methodology – but it just means a rational system of methods that are proven to yield trustworthy* results. The scientific method we all learned in first grade is the basis – but there are some principles that we also need to understand. Things like using randomized (true random is nearly impossible) samples and controls for experiments help keep our own preconceptions out of our data. Basic methodology is the foundation of all science – and it’s not rocket science.

Or brain surgery.

Or a Rubik’s cube.

Fact is, methodology is pretty straightforward and easy to understand. And almost no one has the slightest clue about it – that’s how incredibly badly our education system has failed. It literally hasn’t taught science, not the real thing.

Now I’m going to shock you – people who genuinely believe the Earth is flat (not the guys that claim it just to annoy everyone else) aren’t stupid for holding that position. And it literally makes no difference for the rest of us unless they hold one of a handful of jobs that actually need to calculate based on the curvature of the Earth. Sure, you don’t want your plane’s navigator making up his own calculations but who cares whether or not your brain surgeon can navigate by the stars?

It just doesn’t matter in the least. What is sad is that the ancients could calculate the circumference of the Earth with some string, a stick and a long walk – you can’t, can you? We teach ‘facts’ – we don’t teach science.

Real science matters a LOT more than whether the Earth is round or flat (fun fact, it’s neither – it’s a dumpy spheroid) – because you as a citizen of the United States who has a duty to participate in civil government are bombarded daily with science ‘information’ yet you probably weren’t prepared in school for sorting all that information – let alone telling the good from the bad.

I’ve seen total trash get published in peer reviewed journals. I’ve caught ‘experts’ flat out lying about what actual studies actually said – not merely the media being unable to figure out what a study meant but actual scientists lying about the results of other scientists’ studies. I’m not some super genius – I just know what is and is not good methodology and how to read an abstract.

Here’s the critical thing they never taught in school – if the methodology is bad, the conclusion is crap. Doesn’t matter how smart the analyst or how well reasoned the paper – bad methodology is quick sand and you cannot build a good paper on top of it. The reason is simple – the methodology is what gives us reason to trust the data that the conclusion is based upon. Bad methodology equals bad data – which destroys the entire house of cards.

Polls – at least the professional ones – are done ‘scientifically’. That just means they are done using the principles of methodology. And when they are done with bad methodology, their results are complete crap. How many polls did the media cite today alone? We have numbers thrown at us constantly but have little idea about the principles that underlie the numbers – which means we don’t really know if we can trust those numbers.

We are then expected to make decisions based on ‘information’ we can’t evaluate – we have no idea how reliable that information really is because we don’t understand methodology. But that information informs who we vote for based on what policies they support – it’s a part of the foundation we build our policies on. We should at least understand the basics.

We should teach science in schools.

If we can.

*If you’ve ever been ‘sure’ of something that proved to not be true, you already know that there is no perfect certainty.