More on Scientifically and Technologically Literate Societies

In my previous posting, I may have left that wrong impression that I see training of people in the science and technologically based professions and achieving a general level of scientific and technological literacy as the only priorities in creating a scientifically and technologically literate society.

One of the clear lessons of past decades is that para-professionals can play a key role in developing nations. The barefoot doctors, health auxiliaries, and barefoot biologists can provide important services when and where more formally qualified professionals are not available or affordable. Thus a key element in defining scientific and technological literacy standards for a society is the definition of the standards of knowledge-based competency for primary service providers. Those standards should be based on consideration of the priorities for different services, the pre-training potential of people in the available workforce willing to deliver the services, and the training that can be provided with the available resources.

Literacy for individuals is seen as involving lifelong learning. So too, literacy for a society should be seen in terms of the ability of the society to learn over extended periods of time. As individual literacy involves love of learning, learning skills, and linkages with sources of information, so too should societal literacy involve incentives for knowledge-based improvements of societal performance, societal organization and processes promoting learning, and linkages with (international) sources of information.

The issue, raised in the previous posting, of bringing available expertise to bear where it is needed most deserves considerable thought. In the United States we have lots of physicians offering cosmetic surgery in enclaves of wealth, and too few serving the rural poor. Making conditions attractive enough to bring people with the right training and experience to the jobs where they are most needed is far from easy. I would suggest that the United States faces the other problem -- paying far too much for the services of Chief Operating Officers of big corporations, wasting resources that could be used in other more productive ways to obtain services that in the past were obtained at equal quality and far lower cost.

Scientific and technological knowledge are also embodied in other than human brains. Obviously, technology is upgraded frequently by replacing machinery, because that machinery embodies technological knowledge from its inventors, designers and manufacturers. One may conclude that a scientifically and technologically literate society should have plants and facilities that embody technology appropriate to that society.

So too, knowledge is embodied in institutions -- for example, in organizational and market structures and processes. The economic benefits of the in Industrial Revolution were realized as production and distribution processes in industrializing societies were reorganized. The Information Revolution is being accompanied by similar restructuring of productive sectors and re-engineering of organizations.
In promoting scientifically and technologically literate societies, then, we should presumably encourage societies to seek to modify their institutions to embody appropriate knowledge of the natural, social and man-made worlds in their structure and processes -- setting goals and standards in the process.