Saving U.S. Science

beebo famulus writes "Twenty years from now, experts doubt that America will remain a dominant force in science as it was during the last century. The hand wringing has generated a couple of new ideas to deal with the dilemma. Specifically, one expert says that the federal government should create contests and prize awards for successful science ideas, while another advises that the National Science Foundation fund more graduate students and increase the amount of the fellowships."

Comments

cascading system failure

[nido]

The US systemis filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay. I spent my school days bored out of my mind...

Teachers are very well paid for what they do, which is to prevent most their students from ever discovering personal power. Every single one of your classmates was "bored out of [their] mind" too - you just managed to find a way to make something of yourself, in spite of the government's attempt to dumb you down too. Most of our peers aren't quite so fortunate, for whatever reason.

Read Gatto's essay The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, or his book The Underground History of American Education (available for free online at his website).

Or one of Holt's books - How Children Fail or How Children Learn, for example (incidentally, is that your picture on the schoolbus? :).

The government school experiment is a good example of a cascading system failure. The first teachers came from classical american education, where learning was the learner's responsibility. The first school reform was to transfer responsibility for educational institutions from "the public" to "the government", and it's been all downhill from there.

The government school is corrupt because it places all responsibility for learning on the teacher. The first generation of government school students did well because their teachers had been "properly educated" in the traditional American manner. But every generation of teachers has been a little bit worse than the one before, because the system Doesn't teach children that it's their responsibility to teach themselves whatever they want to learn.

Now, 150 years later, many new teachers are frickin idiots. I had a date some years back with a girl who'd just gotten her teaching certificate, and felt sorry for whoever ended up in her class.

All part of a grand scheme to depower 'the masses' (that is, 'us').