50 years of science
Rob Price

Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, a 184- pound satellite that weighed less than the average professional baseball player. The launch changed the nature of public and private education in the United States; it changed the entire culture of the country - at least for the generation of students growing up in the Cold War and the great ensuing space race between the United States and the USSR.

I was a 2-year-old when Sputnik went up and can't remember the occasion. But Sputnik's influence stretched on, into my childhood and even my teens, as the country scrambled to meet John Kennedy's own scrambling vow to put a man on the moon - and of course return him to earth - by the end of the 1960s.

The launch of Sputnik put rockets on everyone's mind. When we were old enough, my friends and I built model rockets and mimicked the launching of behemoth rockets from Cape Canaveral with high-powered controlled explosions of our own. We launched our rockets on golf courses, school playgrounds, baseball fields and even horse racetracks. The most accomplished model rocketeer among us went on to study engineering at Cornell University. Another friend enjoyed the idea that machines can execute complicated mathematical operations more quickly than most humans; he's programming computers now for the Alcoa Corp.

American adults read about Sputnik and concluded the Soviet Union was about to colonize space. Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which authorized the creation of NASA. Kennedy himself beat Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, in part by arguing a "missile gap" existed between the US and the USSR. Kennedy then committed the country to a manned moon flight - an adventure some historians consider in retrospect foolhardy and a misallocation of scientific resources. Nevertheless, the game was afoot.

Most significantly, Congress in 1958 also passed the National Defense Education Act, which provided in that Cold War atmosphere funding for college scholarships for aspiring scientists, engineers and mathematicians. Professional scientists also began working with high school science teachers, investigating new ways to teach high school physics, biology and chemistry. If the broad culture of postwar America still was centered around factories, the public school system was telling the children of factory workers the time had come to study the atom.

The result was the education of a generation of scientists, engineers and mathematicians who would help the country create, and then play a leading role in, the post-industrial global economy. Manufacturing and agriculture remain staples of that economy, but the technological revolution founded by children who'd grown up under Sputnik is the engine that makes those staples so much more productive than 50 years ago.

We need the equivalent of a Sputnik now.

In spite of 50 years of accelerated science education, popular U.S. culture is scientifically illiterate. A whopping 65 percent of the general population doubts reliable evidence exists in support of the theory of evolution. In 1983, the federal report "A Nation at Risk" cited a "steady decline in science achievement." More recently, the National Academies in 2005 warned the country's scientific and technological base continues to erode. The National Science Board also has warned, "The future strength of the U.S. science and engineering workforce is imperiled."

Part of this problem begins at the top. President Bush has urged teaching evolution and "intelligent design theory" side by side in science classrooms, apparently oblivious to the fact intelligent design is not a scientific concept. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act may also have exacerbated the problem, requiring standardized testing only in math and reading. A Business Week article in 2004 noted "just 26 percent of 2003 high school graduates scored high enough on the ACT science test to have a good chance of completing a first-year college science course."

Meanwhile, the president continues to argue tax cuts are the secret to successful national economy. Something needs to scare this president, or at least the next, out of tax-cut politics and into more federal support for better education in the sciences. Devotees of tax cuts point to the Reagan tax cuts as the driving force behind the country's economic expansion that began in the 1980s. They overlook the impact of a single generation growing into its adulthood, a generation that 50 years ago looked into the night sky and saw the blinking lights of Sputnik.