Word: sputnik
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...preserve sales, textbook publishers are beating a none too stately retreat from evolution after giving it strong emphasis in the post-Sputnik editions of the 1960s, which aimed at more and better science teaching. To enter the lucrative Texas market, many biology textbook publishers now bow to a requirement by the state's school board and include a statement that evolution is clearly presented as theory rather than fact. More significant, according to Gerald Skoog, 45, professor of education at Tex as Tech University, textbooks now say less about evolution. Between 1974 and 1977, the section on Darwin...
...Sputnik I, a tiny dot of light moving across the autumn sky, did what nothing else had done for nearly 20 years: it scared Washington. The people who knew the implications, like Astronomer John Hagen, head of Project Vanguard, America's own unborn space probe, stayed up all night linking a hasty network of aerials to catch the faint beeps of the intruder that mocked the presumed U.S. technological superiority. Power and politics were never again the same in the capital. Sputnik signaled a new superpower on the prowl. Space, for the moment, was the area of contention...
Carl Sagan is the best thing to happen to science education since Sputnik...
...nearby planets, under the tutelage of the late Gerard Kuiper. He realized that planets were the most likely places for extraterrestrial life to be found in his lifetime. He also anticipated that the U.S. would soon embark on an ambitious program of planetary exploration. At a party just before Sputnik I spurred American space activity, Sagan made a perspicacious wager: he bet a case of chocolate bars that the U.S. would reach the moon by 1970. He won with five months to spare...
...academic effectiveness of the system was challenged in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite. Almost overnight, it was perceived that American training was not competitive with that of the U.S.S.R. Public criticism and government funds began to converge on U.S. schools. By 1964, achievement scores in math and reading had risen to an alltime high. But in the '60s the number of students (and teachers too) was expanding tremendously as a result of the maturing crop of post-World War II babies. In the decade before 1969, the number of high school teachers almost doubled, from...