ABSTRACT
'Science matters, we have been told in a recent spate of publications. In Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy, "science literacy" is defined as "the knowledge you need to understand public issues . . . to put new [scientific] advances into a context that will allow you to take part in the national debate about them" (1991a:xii). Unproblematic as this definition might seem at first glance, the authors contend that by any measure, "Americans as a whole simply have not been exposed to science sufficiently or in a way that communicates the knowledge they need to have to cope with the life they will have to lead in the twenty-first century" (xv). This dire (and, we would like to argue, unfair) diagnosis becomes more understandable when one confronts the extremely narrow and technocratic content of the knowledge contained in Science Matters and most other books about science literacy. For example, in media publications spun off from Science Matters, readers are given a "pop quiz" that tests scientific literacy, a quiz that the great majority of Americans at all educational levels would fail (Hazen and Trefil 1991b). One question from the quiz is
