Science for All Americans: Seeking a Common Knowledge Core Across Disciplines

The director of Project 2061 replies: Richard Conn Henry makes two points in his letter, one identifying awkward language and one criticizing the exclusion of advanced physics topics from Science for All Americans. We will certainly fix the awkward language, as we have done in the past, and thank him for pointing it out. However, we stand by our choice of learning goals.

Our authors attempted to define a common core of knowledge, across science, mathematics, and technology, that would be optimally useful and enlightening (given constraints of students’ time, interests, and abilities) for every high-school graduate, not just for those who aspire to scientific or technical careers. Difficult decisions about what was both important and possible included input from numerous chemistry and physics faculty, who have found that few college students understand the particulate nature of matter and the significance of the periodic table, let alone the significance of the standard model.

Science for All Americans does not claim to be a ceiling, but a floor; high-school and college faculty consider it quite ambitious. Perhaps with better materials and teaching we can achieve universal science literacy on which to build understanding of more sophisticated ideas such as quantum mechanics and biological signal transduction.

Project 2061 views Science for All Americans and Benchmarks for Science Literacy as living documents, subject to ongoing review and suggested revisions by scientists and educators. We welcome criticism and take it seriously. Interested readers can compare sections on cells, structure of matter, and energy transformations in their original 1989 print version with those in the current online version at our Web site, http://www.project2061.org .