Culture and Growing UP (Score 0)

The paper states: "Republicans who are college graduates are considerably less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change than those who have received less education. These better-educated Republicans could hardly be said to suffer a knowledge deficit". This assumes that being a graduate implies having knowledge about science and/or technology. However, having a degree in theology or politics or English literature is not incompatible with having a "knowledge deficit" in science. Much more useful would be to look at the differences between people who are educated in the basics of science and technology and those who are not. It seems to me that there is nowadays a cultural problem that goes right back to childhood experiences. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, and my memory is of a time when there was tremendous excitement about science and technology. We would watch the US space programme on television: humans walking on the moon! The shelves in my local newsagent were full of Practical Wireless, Practical Electronics, Everyday Electronics, Amateur Radio, car maintenance magazines and manuals, etc. New Scientist and Scientific American were there on the shelf as well. I could go down to the high street and buy the components to build real, working electronic things, and by the age of 11, I had a basic understanding of what resistors, capacitors, transistors and diodes did. Here in the UK, we had programmes like "How?", "Tomorrow's World", and "Horizon" that were whown on prime-time TV and watched by millions. There are some such programmes now, like "Brainiac", but they wouldn't stand a chance of being in prime-time. All of this stuff seems to have gone now - it's almost as if the free availability of knowledge through the internet has killed off the thirst for knowledge. I also wonder about the tendency to refer to "Science", "Technology" and "Engineering" together as if they were one and the same. They are actually quite different things that may require quite different approaches. The issue of whether it is socially acceptable to site a wind farm in a particular location has virtually nothing to do with Science, and more to do with art. I happen to find wind farms quite beautiful things myself, but it seems many other people don't. I don't really know why this is, but in many cases, I think people like or dislike what they are told to like or dislike.