Math & Science (and other Bush fallacies)
I'll make it brief. The focus on, "necessity of, "math and science" in American K-12 education is but one of the Bush Administration's fallacies.
Just because China and India produce more engineers than the United States, doesn't equate to it being a bad thing.
First of all, how many engineers do we need? It would seem there are enough American students who don't need to be told they are motivated to excel in math and science and engineering - who are self motivated - to fill the open positions for engineers. With manufacturing no longer a mainstay of the American economy, just how many engineers do we need here to begin with. Also, we can continue to "import" engineers from countries like India and China as we have been doing for decades, since there has always been a "brain drain" intot the United States.
What are the consequences of putting math and science on high priority? Well my children who attend a public school only have one PE period a week. We had one a day. And isn't obesity rampant in America? What of advertising and sales of all those products American engineers will be making? Shouldn't we regard the creative arts - english, public speaking, art - as just as high priority as math and science? If India and China excel at math and science education, why can't we specialize in liberal arts?
If you would like to post additional Bush Administration fallacies where Americans have been led astray, please post them. I'll start off with the most obvious one - the Iraq War being part of the war on terror.
I won't say "liberal arts" are irrelevant to national security, as long as languages and area studies are considered within their scope. There is a clear relationship between science, engineering, and national security--and national economic health, specifically including developing energy independence.
Especially since the dot-com crash, it has been harder for first-rate American engineers to find work, especially when employers establish a low rate of pay in an area, can't get citizen workers, and justify H1B imports. Meanwhile, those employers stopped paying previously customary relocation benefits, so the citizen technical people either can't afford to move or take a financial bath when doing so.
Given a choice between the technical areas and liberal arts, if it has to be a choice, I prefer the US specialize in science and technology. That, incidentally, does not necessarily mean trained researchers; we do a poor job training technicians and skilled craftsmen. Some of the best mechanical engineers, and many of the top computer scientists, are self-taught.
More than science or liberal arts, the truly important thing to teach is how to learn, and how to keep learning through life. Personally, I've published books and articles in various aspects of sciences, but also political policy. While I've placed in juried photographic competition, these days I do more drawing, still feeling out the best medium. I'm a damned fine cook, but can turn off my esthetic senses when there's a messy need for emergency care. To quote Lazarus Long, "specialization is for insects."
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Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
January 24, 2007 1:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree Howard that I should have in retrospect edited the bit about "how about America specialize in the liberal arts" to just going back to the well rounded education, not specializing in math and science.
Here we have the conservatives always informing us they want limited government. But they have decided math and science achievement must be forced upon the schools at the expense of physical education and the arts.
Many software engineers are outsourced or imported from places like India and China as well. And we have shifted to a service economy where manufactured products are imported from places like China and India. So again I ask who is going to employ all of these engineers and scientists? And will they be as creatively inventive lacking the additional right brain development they might have had in a balanced curriculum?
I also agree with you regarding we should be teaching how to learn and the importance of life long learning.
January 24, 2007 12:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Apropos the right brain, you've described what often is distinguishing about really good scientists and engineers. There appears to be a very high correlation between musical and cryptographic skill; NSA has a jazz group that plays around the DC area and has a long waiting list for its gigs. On December 7, 1941, the band of the USS Arizona happened to be giving a concert on shore, and survived. Of course, every office at Pearl Harbor was desperate for people, but, in a case of the round peg in the round hole, they were assigned as clerical help to the communications intelligence group, where quite a number progressed rapidly.
Good people are hardly inarticulate; just the opposite if anything. A friend of mine acquired a pet python, and she called me when he first shed his skin. I mentioned this to an English colleague, who thought for a moment, and then observed "Ah. The Full Monty Python."
I draw and photograph. Often, when looking at the best engineering drawing, there is an esthetic nuance.
As far as who will hire these people, the last time I looked at some statistics, a while ago, the body of knowledge in medicine, based on published papers and new topics in book indices, doubled every seven years. Since then, there have been fundamental breakthroughs in genomics and molecular pharmacology, so I would expect the rate of knowledge acquisition to be accelerating even faster.
That seems like a rationale right there to have more people. Which grows faster -- population or knowledge?
It is quite possible to have research teams that collaborate all over the world. Personally, I've had to coordinate the local times of people from San Jose to Stockholm for corporate work, and, for Internet engineering, literally worldwide.
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Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
January 24, 2007 2:41 PM | Reply | Permalink