Carl Sagan’s “Why We Need To Understand Science”

Carl Sagan’s “Why We Need To Understand Science” talks about how our country needs to reach for a more scientific education. Sagan’s essay provides us with statistics showing how our country, America, falls behind when it comes to mathematical and scientific education, compared to British Columbia, Japan, Britain, and Korea. He believes that “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” I agree with Sagan because a huge part of our life, almost everything we do or feel, involves science.

At one point in the essay, Sagan reinforces his point by explaining to us how important science is to our everyday lives. His main goal is to “deepen public understanding of science.” He mentions how important it is to understand everything that is happening around us. For example, knowing about global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, is all part of understanding science. He mentions that jobs and wages all depend on science and technology. Without science, we would we be missing a huge part of our everyday lives. Sagan at one point, however, talks about why some may believe that people are against or worried about science and technology. He explains that science can also be harmful to some extent, not only “pouring out good deeds to the world.” He uses nuclear weapons as an example. Sagan tells us that we can not just conclude that science puts too much power in someone. We can not simply just try to get rid of science. One point that he makes that really caught my attention when reading this essay was when he said, “Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.” Yes, in some ways, science can be harmful, but it has always done us a lot of good. There are both positive and negative aspects of science but that can also be said about almost everything.

Sagan explains to us why he feels is the reason that our country is so behind compared to others in education and what we can do to fix it. He feels that things are a lot different now than they were during the Great Depression. Teaching was an admired profession and they enjoyed teaching. He believes that this is not the case anymore. “…learning was widely recognized as the road out of poverty. Little of that is true today.” Sagan did not fully blame the teachers and parents but also the children as well. He made a great point when he described how different high school students are compared to how we were when we were in the kindergarten or first grade. He says that at that young age, children are curious and ask a lot of questions because they are young and want to learn. In high school however, it is totally different. At that age, people are worried about what their peers may think of them so that can cause them to be hesitant in asking questions to learn, fearing that it would be a dumb question. When I read this part of the essay, I was pretty shocked with how accurate this was. I never realized it until now. Sadly, our self consciousness does play a huge part on our thrive to learn.