Editor
As the Cold War was waning, the physicist Lewis Branscomb feared that America’s economic and scientific superiority was in jeopardy. Declining scientific literacy and critical thinking in American education, he believed, could have disastrous consequences for the country.
Students, he told “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS in 1986, “don’t need to know a lot of facts about science, but they really do need to understand how to think…
