IT GETS WORSE... Scientists and educators in the early 1960s assumed that the issue of fighting the increasing science and math illiteracy among the general public could be tackled directly by improved K-12 and college textbooks, very greatly improved training for K-12 teachers, and various innovations in the way science and math were presented in class. Furthermore, all students would be required to take basic courses in math and science.  In fact, however, every such effort floundered completely. Why? Even worse, in many states (particularly the so-called Red States) students and parents actively sought to prevent basic facts of science from even being taught in the K-12 public schools!
The decisive stumbling block of the late 1960s and early 1970s turned out to be fundamentalist/evangelical religion, combined with K-12 public school desegregation. Desegregation, in the Red States particularly, had the effect of removing upper and middle class students from the public school system. The alternative to public schools, for middle class kids, was almost always schools created by local churches in response to precisely this demand... and these schools usually did not offer science or advanced math.   This left the public schools in the Red States entirely to minority and poor-family kids... and the resulting high dropout rates, which were often penalized by state and federal legislation, inevitably led to watered-down courses and options that allowed most students to skip “college prep” courses, which of course were always science and math!  Even at large state universities, most students can today choose to skip even the most basic and introductory math and science classes... because universities today have a severe drop-out problem... with dropout rates as high as 50%.... as you might have predicted from the sort of preparation for college work that students now get in the K-12 courses!  And essentially all of physics, chemistry and biology (and even topics like algebra) were deemed by parents who were fanatical followers of widespread fundamentalist/evangelical Christian cults to be objectionable, dangerous for children, and “elitist,” aimed mainly at flunking out children who were properly raised in a “devout, Christian” home environment!



One social and political development that amplifies the problem is the gradual evolution of the Republican Party into an extremist position of steadfastly denying or ignoring basic scientific facts.
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