SCIENCE WATCH : No Rocket Scientist

President Bush is a highly educated man. He studied at the elite Phillips Academy in Andover before going on to become the Navy’s youngest commissioned pilot. After World War II, Bush went on to Yale, where he earned an economics degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key in little more than two years.

Yet with such impressive academic credentials, the President joked at the National Summit on Mathematics that he did “not know anything about physics.” We suspect that the President was in his self-deprecating “gee, I’m just a regular kinda fella” mode, because Navy pilots do study physics, and Yale is hardly a slouch school.

Nevertheless, Bush’s joke hit a flat note with some attending the conference because it underscored the myth that math and science are beyond the grasp of many, even presidents.

“It made me cringe inside, that he felt free to say that he didn’t know anything about physics,” said one educator. “That’s what we’re trying to work against, that feeling that it’s all right to know nothing about science.”

People often joke that they are lousy at adding 2 plus 2, said another educator, but they would never “feel comfortable saying that they couldn’t read L-O-O-K.”

The President has made it one of his goals to make U.S. students No. 1 in science and math by the year 2000; he knows that better science education is crucial to the nation’s future. And now he knows that even joking about the typical American attitude toward math and science is a little too painful to be funny these days.