'Cosmos' host Neil deGrasse Tyson's scope set on scientific literacy

"Well, I don't have to imagine what it is. There have been international tests to assess where our students are on various objective scales. And among industrialized nations we're consistently near the bottom of the list in every way that matters. That's just the fact. So the next question is: Does being so low on those lists come with consequences that matter...We've been very economically competitive even through several decades of these very low scores so maybe the scores are not the best indicator of what we are or what we will become in the future.

"However, some things are happening. I think we've lost our exploratory mojo. So, for example, my hat's off to the European Space Agency for landing a space probe on a comet. That is a space feat without precedent. But I grew up in an era when NASA was doing all of the space feats that had no precedent. So little signs like this are indicators that we are not on the frontier anymore. The Higgs boson, which received banner headlines in The New York Times, was discovered in Switzerland in a particle accelerator built by a European collaboration. And we would have discovered it back in the 1990s because we had a particle accelerator (partially built, then canceled by Congress)."