The Standard for Scientific Literacy

Charles Vest, president of NAE and former president of MIT, says high school graduates in America need to understand how the building blocks of science work.

The Standard for Scientific Literacy Question: What is the standard for scientific literacy? Charles Vest: I think that all young people graduating from, say high school certainly need to understand the basic elements of mathematics. Certainly through algebra; hopefully a bit beyond that, understand to some extent how it can be used to model the real world. They need to understand and this is a critical issue today. They need to understand what science is. That it is a way of drawing on hundreds of years of human intelligence being applied to measuring things; to understanding what objective data are; and to take facts and put them together and build them into theories; into understanding how things work; and then how that can be taken through the field of engineering to designing and building things that extend our capabilities and enable us to do our jobs. So they need to be able to quantitatively reason. They need to understand what science is and what the scientific method is. They need to understand that without that scientific and mathematical underpinning you cannot build big structures. You cannot run industries. You cannot have your health improve. It’s really those basics that I think our young people need to know, because believe me if you go to China, and Singapore, and parts of India and so forth, you’ll find a lot of kids going very quickly; fire in the belly in these fields, and ultimately wanting to eat our lunch. We can’t let them do that. We have to both compete and cooperate. But our young people need to have the opportunities that the new age is going to provide them.