I had an interesting discussion with my wife (a biomedical / robotics engineer) about the first sentence under the photo "Is robotics science? A lot of people would apparently say no."<p>Interestingly "robotics" doesn't appear anywhere else in the article. But as a computer scientist I couldn't say definitively that the answer to that is "yes"... even my wife says "it depends"... so the stipulation the article starts out with that not knowing the answer to that question means the parents are scientifically illiterate is a false one.<p>Just like movies and TV shows now often call characters "scientists" that are clearly doing engineering not science.<p>I realize there is a huge overlap and it is possible to be both a scientist and an engineer. But I can't help but to feel this survey and the author don't realize there is a difference between the two.
I am pretty sure that, given the state of decline that our public schools have been in for at least 1-2 decades, fewer people are understanding much of anything these days.<p>Particularly with growing initiatives that effective hold our best back in a futile attempt to bring our worse up, with things like integrated classrooms. We seem to be regressing to a very lukewarm mean. I graduated from high school in 2007 and already recognized that the signs were there.<p>I don't know where this country is going, but it seems like our current path flirts dangerously with ignorance and underachievement in the name of so called equality. Which, by the way, is too often conflated with equity.