A big part of the “diversity” mania is to water curricula and tests down so that the supposedly terrible racial gaps will disappear. That appears to have driven the people who run the American College Test (ACT) to make the science section of their test optional.

Is this a bad sign? In today’s Martin Center article, J. Scott Turner of the National Association of Scholars argues that it is.

Turner writes:

Science is the ultimate “hard to measure skill,” because it is not a skill but a philosophy of how to understand the natural world. It depends not only on a mastery of subject matter but also on an abiding curiosity tempered by a methodology of disciplined inquiry. Cultivating that ethic involves not just mastery of subject matter but also a deep knowledge of the history of science and a familiarity with the innumerable twists and turns in the path to our present scientific knowledge of the natural world. It also cultivates a humility of thought, so we can see why the remarkable individuals who have shaped our current thinking thought the way they did, as well as the potential flaws in our own ways of scientific thinking. To treat science as an assessable skill is to reduce science to a form of performance art.

We have been spending more and more on “science education” since the Obama years, but getting less and less to show for it.

Read the whole thing.