Egad!

Yesterday, I received a fund raising letter from the Museum of Science in Boston, MA, the content of which made me do a double take (and not because my forty-seven-year-old eyes are deteriorating). Consider the opening sentence:

A survey by the National Opinion Research Center showed about one in four American adults believe the Sun goes around the Earth.

One in four adults. That’s 25% folks. 25% of American adults do not know enough basic science to understand that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the original survey to check if this same percentage of people were also missing the fact that the Earth rotates on an axis whilst traveling about the Sun. I tried to defend these survey interviewees to myself for a moment, thinking that this statistic was returned by the survey because of how the survey designers asked the question, but the letter continued with this:

The same survey found people who believe that electrons are larger than atoms…that lasers work by focusing sound waves…that antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria…

And people wonder why I homeschool.