Which leads me to another phenomenon contributing to the widespread dearth of knowledge in the country: the education system’s obsession, as I’ve found in my own research, with labeling youngsters as scientifically “able” or “talented” at an early age. Most often this labeling is based upon how rapidly students can obtain correct answers to questions when the answers are already known—not on how they respond to the kinds of intriguing questions for which the answer isn’t known, the kinds that are often key to gauging scientific talent.

Therefore, many of America’s very talented students come to believe that they have little aptitude for science and engineering—eventually moving into professions far removed from the sciences. Many never take a science course after they have completed the final requirement in high school—even though the 20th century was distinguished by the extraordinary contributions of science and technology to contemporary culture and the economic well-being of Americans. What they know about science and technology must, then, come from various news and social-media sources and from whatever teaching they may have received in American history during high school or in college.

If someone today is ignorant of science and technology—and of its implications for the average citizen—it is likely to come from what he read or was taught through American-history courses. In the late 1990s, I examined the content of a number of the leading American history textbooks used in high schools and colleges. These books, which were authored by world-class historians, were almost totally devoid of discussions of science. I contrasted space devoted to science and technology with that to contemporary culture and the arts and found, as just one example, that much more discussion was devoted to, say, the singer Madonna than to James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of the DNA molecule. The same was true when it came to scores of other scientific discoveries.

In fact, in these massive textbooks a few pages at most were dedicated to science—and when that was the case, it was mostly to a brief discussion of the discovery of atomic power and the atom bomb. In this great century of American science, a stranger would likely never know from these texts that science and technology had played a central role in the growth of American society.

Have things in the textbook world changed since the 1990s? To answer this question, I’ve recently reviewed, in a cursory fashion to be sure, the content of some of today’s leading high-school texts for AP American-history courses as well as some widely used in American colleges (although the leading schools rarely rely on textbooks). One of the most widely used and highly praised is The American Pageant, by the renowned historians David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas Bailey. This turns out to be one of the most popular texts used to prepare high-school students for AP examinations; I looked at the 13th edition of a couple of years ago.