History
Reforms in science education in the United States have often been driven by strategic challenges such as the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and the Japanese economic boom in the 1980s. By contrast, scientific literacy is now taken to mean that everyone should have a working knowledge of science and its role in society. Science literacy is seen as a right of every person and a requirement for responsible members of society, one that helps average people to make better decisions and enrich their lives. The shift occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the publication of "Science for All Americans" and "Benchmarks for Science Literacy".
Initial definitions of science literacy included elaborations of the actual content that people should understand, and this content often followed somewhat traditional lines (biology, chemistry, physics). Earth science was somewhat narrowly defined as expanded geological processes. In the decade after those initial documents, ocean scientists and educators revised the notion of science literacy to include more contemporary, systems-oriented views of the natural world, leading to scientific literacy programs for the ocean, climate, earth science, and so on. This shift has ensured that educators' views of science literacy stay in sync with the directions and advances of real science in the real world.
Read more about this topic: Scientific Literacy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)