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New Awards To Compete With Nobel Prizes
Tsalg writes "The Nobel prizes will soon have company. Fred Kavli, a Norwegian physicist, is funding new awards in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience and nanotechnology. Kavli already funds several think tanks both in the U.S. and abroad, and intends the awards to help 'spread the word of science and get more students interested', as 'in many parts of the world that's a problem, from Norway to the United States...'"
I'd argue that lack of preparation at the lowest levels has a lot to do with it, followed by lack of appreciation on the job.
The K-12 education system is a mess. Unfortunately, it isn't broken: it's working roughly as designed. It keeps the kids warehoused and off the labor market until age 18, which keeps unemployment rate down and the labor unions happy. It keeps the teachers' union strong. It provides free babysitting, which keeps the parents happy. It even provides a smattering of education to the children of the middle class, though that's only because of a few dedicated teachers who are doing their best to subvert the system.
It isn't a matter of money: every country which outscores us on standardized tests spends less money per student than we do. In 1998, the average per student expenditure for U.S. elementary and high schools was roughly the same as the per student expenditure at Harvard (NOT the tuition, but Harvard's expenditure).
The experience of recent immigrants suggests that cultural expectations are a big part of the problem: immigrants from the Caribbean usually do significantly better in school than American blacks in the same schools. Immigrants from China and Russia usually excel in the same schools in which American students avoid education. American schools foster an anti-intellectual culture which rewards ``students'' with popularity for almost anything but academic success.
Homeschoolers are educating their children to far higher standards than any public school, and at far less cost. While American public schools are spending over $7,000 per student, most homeshcoolers are spending less than $1,000 per student. That means they are spending roughly 1/10 the money, to get far better results. One big reason they are able to do this is is that they are able to socialize their children, in contrast to the public, warehouse schools, which anti-socialize them. Homeschooled children spend every day in society, seeing how adults value and reward work and learning. It's no wonder that they learn a very different lesson than the children in the warehouse schools.
Why are young Americans choosing any field but engineering and science? A big part of it is that the public schools don't prepare them adequately for anything, but especially not for the sciences. After teaching calculus to American engineering students at a competitive state university, I can say that even American engineering students are abysmally ill-prepared in math.
Then there's the problem of the reward on the job: why would any sensible person want to go into a field which requires long hours of hard study in school, followed by longer hours of harder work on the job, and rewards it with relatively low pay? Anyone who could make a good living as an engineer could make a much better living in something like financial engineering, accounting or actuary science, and the hours would be no worse.
Third, engineering is an ``up or out'' profession: after 5 to 10 years, most engineers are unemployable, since fresh graduates are available to do the same work (so their management thinks) for less money. Engineers who don't move into management eventually get laid off, and wind up flipping burgers. Why not coast through business school and go directly into management? You wind up in the same position, with less work and higher lifetime earnings.
If you become an engineer, you will work for managers who really believe that an engineer fresh out of school is better than an experienced engineer, because he's cheaper. Your management will sooner or later follow that to the logical conclusion that the engineer in China is ten times better than you, because he's ten times cheaper.
I got an engineering degree twenty years ago, but I never worked as an engineer, and today I'm an economist. What I've written abo
See what I've been reading.
Professor Richard Hamming was fond of saying that you can get money beyond your dreams if you solve any one of the 3 hardest problems in physics - timetravel, antigravity, or teleportation. Do you see Physics majors attacking these problems tooth & nail ? As Hammings explains, there's just no known attack.
Americans aren't warming up to the sciences simply because they have a choice. Students get to decide what they want to study. They look at the difficulty levels of the subject, the job market, ask their peers & parents, look at career prospects & evaluate their "sexiness", and decide to major in English & Communication & Marketing instead. In India, where I come from, you simply didn't have a choice, (well, not until you were 18 anyway, by which time it was too late for most of us). You were asked to digest megadoses of math & science in high school. Hell, I remember working on some "preliminary math" problems when I did my Masters in CompSci in the US. The problems were ones I had previously encountered when I was in my early teens, in my high school! But the Professor said American undergrads needed that sort of thing!!
You guys have a choice, so you study literature & photography & journalism & whatnot in your high school. In India, the only choices are math, more math & much more math. So I can comfortably handle a second order differential equation. But to this day I have not studied Shakespear ( spelling ? ), Rosseu, Homer ( not simpson, the pgilosopher chap), Keats, Byron or any other literary figures. I just know the names cause we crammed them for various "general knowledge" quizzes!
Education systems are broken all over the world. In places like India & China, we get a one-sided hard-core math-sci curricula with no literature. In the US/UK, you guys get liberal arts with less math/science than what Bill Gates wants to hire.
Prizes are not the answer (Nor is a $100 laptpop for developing nations). I don't know what is.