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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."
... of experts who have not learned from history.
I was told the same thing back in the 80s. About how my generation was falling behind compared to the 60s and their great space race. How kids in Ethiopia were doing better in quantum physics than the average US Sophomore.
Well let me tell you something. While those nerds from the 60s went to the moon and got nothing out of it, my generation of nerds built the Web and Wireless and Palm-based computing so that we can download any type of porn to satisfy any type of fetish at any time, any where. BEAT THAT.
So I say to these experts to stop thinking about prizes and stupid contests. What they need to worry about is how to throw porn into any problem we may have and I'll damn well assure you that us good old U.S. of Fucking-A nerds will be able to solve it.
Can I get a witness?
"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."
How did we not think of that! Throw more money at the problem, that always works
It doesn't take a damned expert to figure out what's wrong, ask any geek that's in high school or recently graduated. Our problem is cultural, there's such an anti-intellectual problem in schools and the rest of society, actively encourage exploration (you know, the heart of science) throughout the development of today's youth, and within one generation we'll be sorted.
It's not as complicated as many make it out to be, encourage today's youth to think for themselves and experiment, not conform.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
How about instead of using fairy tales and pseudoscience to explain to folks how the universe operates, we actually teach them the science.
I know, I know, giving people science instead of religious precepts is a wild and crazy idea but someone has to suggest it.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Handwringing, maybe?
It's taken decades to devolve the American science curriculum into little more than basic biology. That means that today's graduates who would be eligible for participation in these science fairs are already past the point of redemption. In fact, any high school student is already past that point as well since they don't have a strong enough background from elementary and middle school.
So what does that mean? It means that it will take at least another 10 years of good science teaching to bring the next generation of kids up to speed with the rest of the world.
We're in a mess so big and so deep and so tall, we can't clean it up, there's no way at all.
Contests and things like that are nice incentives, but everything rests on the fundamentals.
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
Well, US voters elected twice (not just once, but twice!) a man that does not care about science, and has been trying to undermine some of the most prestigious US research centers if they disagree with his policies or analysis.
And this man is backed by (a) a group of people who want an end to big governement and (b) another group of people who believe an obscure semitic carpenter - turned - Savior - turned - deity is going to come back Real Soon Now, which will bring the end of the world as we know it and the judgement of the unbelievers.
So is this so surprising?
I know this sounds very trollish/flame-baitish, and it's also a caricature, but the fact is, Big Government is that what gave an edge to the USA since around 1940, and most people who go to a hall of worship on Sunday morning turn out to be not so great scientists (I know, I know, there are exceptions, blah, blah, blah). Actually, only 17% of them even know their sacred scriptures, according to a recent survey.
So, let me ask you again: is that so surprising? I think not. Another brilliant civilization rejected science and went into a profound decline: it was the Middle-Ages Moslem civilization. Think about that for a minute.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
>The hang wringing has generated a couple of new ideas to deal with the dilemma.
Don't wring your hang in public.
They'll arrest you.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
So, the state-run education system is failing and we're falling behind in science.
Recommended solutions?
*Even more* state-run education - more funding, prizes, competitions.
I'm waiting for the day someone will come along and say: wait a minute, maybe this SHOULDN'T be provided by central government. Maybe we should give people back the money we'd tax to pay for it and let them do it for themselves.
Of course, the reason you don't see this much is because if you say to the State: you don't need to provide this service now, the service stops for sure, but the tax reduction? *that doesn't happen*. So people cling on to whatever they can get out of the State, because they know if it's taken away, they only lose.
That america will retain the lead, and even improve it.
... algebra ... computational theory ... everything is disappearing from exact science curricula. This cannot be a good thing.
I realize America's science is not progressing at the rate academics would like. However, this is happening everywhere, and it's a LOT worse over here. Trust me, a LOT.
Lots of material is being dropped from the curriculum. Phd positions are not getting filled. And everything is made easier in name of "everybody being equal", everybody "needs" equal access to university (and somehow access does not mean "a chance to try" but actual graduation), and the only way to do that is dropping the level of education by a lot.
Math is being dropped like a stone in every subject. Numerical analysis
"Twenty years from now, experts doubt that America will remain a dominant force in science [CC] as it was during the last century.
Maybe a good place to start would be with better writing. The sentence above incorrectly suggests that experts will, in 20 years, make such a prediction.
In any case, the US has never been able to produce the number of highly skilled graduates necessary to maintain its dominance in science. America's dominance in science is largely due easy immigration, an open society, and a high living standard in the US relative to other nations. It seems pretty clear that all of those factors are changing for the worse.
I don't see anything that can be done about it. If Americans aren't willing to maintain a high standard of living, a rational and secular society, and a meritocracy for the direct benefits that those policies bring, they aren't going to do it in order to attract foreign scientists either.
When I see what british professors accomplishments are, I wouldn't fear too much about the future of U.S. science :)
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
I think the reason for less students pursuing science and engineering fields is largely due to offshoring and the importation of labor through H1B visa. Many students have the perception, which is not inaccurate, that their jobs will be given to H1B visas or just shipped overseas. Look at students pursing computer science and information technology degress: they come out of school and they don't get hired. I knew it would be a sad day when I saw a job fair in New York City for technology jobs in Ireland. I never thought I would have to leave my country to find work. My brother studied mechanical engineering and he did well academically yet no one would hire him except for 6.50 per hour machinist job. His anger and frustration was justifiable. The offering of prizes is nothing but shortsighted and completely fails to address the roots of the problem. Unless the prizes are ubiquitous enough to give every science graduate whom does well employment, than it is a poorly spent effort. It will take a fundamental attitude shift beginning with our president whom supports offshoring and H1B programs. Our president, our government, and our corporations are contributing to our decline in science and manufacturing. Gee, with all of this in the forefront, why would I want to go into science? Perhaps I am wrong, but the article's solution seems more typical of a politician. I think they know the real reason but would ultimately get burned if they should make the suggestion that it is government. After all, it is our senators and congressman that voted for tax incentives for labor importation and H1B visas.
One problem is that a pernicious idea has gripped academia which is that somehow the way corporations operate is categorically better for everything - including how to run a university. So, research, publishing, and even teaching are oriented towards a bottom line, giving them at best third-quarter foresight. The strength of an idea on its own merits independent of its profitability is seen as archaic and dysfunctional. Universities all want to be 'corporate', thinking this will somehow improve education. Paying attention to what professors say will help things seems to be falling from favor.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Seems like a better way to encourage innovation is to reduce the fear of being curious. The copyright and patent laws coupled with the sue happy legal system we have makes folks afraid to experiment, or at least to share the results of those experiments. If we can't completely remove the copyright and patent laws, at least reduce them down to something resonable in today's society, to maybe 5 years or so after initial release of a product. If they haven't made money in that time, then give someone else a try... my .02
--cfd
Two factors contributed to the US's good position in scientific research during the last century:
1 -- The economic decline of Britain, especially the vast amount of intellectual property that Britain had to give to the US in exchange for resources to resist Hitler.
2 -- The rapid maturing and solidifying of the US commercial world, which created intense competition as the number of companies collapsed -- the result was a period during which very large entities had a very strong need to gain a competitive advantage.
Neither of these factors is with us any more. Britain (as a center of technological research that could then be passed on to the US cheaply) is long gone. The US commercial landscape has settled down and now has a much better supply of cheap labor (cheap labor competes with technological innovation to fulfil the same need). So, yes, I'd say we can expect a flattening-off of the rate of technological progress in the US. It doesn't mean there's a big educational disaster or anything.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
It has less to do with the amount of prizes and awards available, and more to do with how we live. The curriculum in public schools is devolving into a watered-down, bland concoction designed to make people feel good about themselves, while as a nation, we are no longer wowed by anything in the hard-scientific realm. Rampant consumerism is the final frontier now....We are in danger of being slaves to our own success.
We need a breakthrough that will capture the imagination of the public at large. (Evidence of life on other planets would be great) Either that, or a new great war effort to spur on innovation and discovery. I would prefer the former.
As usual, these sort of articles keep on suggesting increasing the number of graduate students.
How about another suggestion? How about increasing the number of permanent positions instead of low-paying temporary positions? How about job security? How about flexibility e.g. allowing women to have a couple of years off to have a kid and then reenter academia? How about improving work conditions so that working yourself to exhaustion is not considered the norm? Work conditions for scientists are basically crap. Job security is crap. Pay is crap. The only good thing about being a scientist is well the ability to do science, which is nice. But people have got to eat, kids have to be fed and clothed you know, and sometimes we might want to actually spend time with said kids and not constantly worry about begging for money or finding a new position. Basically, with the job conditions for science, you have to really really really really love science otherwise it's just an exercise in masochism. With this why would many kids choose science for a career? In the past, how many kids chose being a monk and devoting themselves to a life of sacrifice, piety, poverty, starvation and interrupted sleep as you get up in the middle of night for prayers for the sake of God? In science today there is almost a monastic attitude in which this sort of thing is *expected* as part of the norm.
Basically with the work conditions and lack of job security for young scientists today, science is not a career, it is a *calling*. Something which you have to love so much you're willing to put up with very bad work conditions and a good chance of never finding a good permanent position.
Adding more graduate students will just make things worse. More competition for jobs -> even worse work conditions and job security.
Prizes help spur research towards specific, known, targeted goals. That's not a bad thing (ethical research is almost never a bad thing) but it's only a small part of the problem, and probably not the most important part.
So called "pie in the sky" research with no application in sight seems to be increasingly difficult to justify to those with the purse strings. If someone isn't solving a problem, defending it as worthwhile is difficult. From the article:
"Dangling prizes in front of innovators has benefits not found in the typical funding process. By offering a prize, government pays for success instead of rewarding a research proposal, as occurs with grants."
Research is not just success - in fact, it's not even mostly success. You can't budget just to pay for the successes, or no one will be able to afford to go after the prizes. Plus, failures can often teach as much or more than successes.
Fortunately, Kalil acknowledges that prizes are not all that's needed. Personally I am wary of ANY prizes being introduced since there is a temptation to be "budget minded" in the future by paring down to just the prizes, which sound good while being less effective in reality. Also, institutions might pressure researchers to head for goals that have a prize rather than pursuing something more interesting to the researcher.
Perhaps a good summary of recent problems can be found at the end of this ( http://www.ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=985 ) article:
"Optimism about the current proposal to double the NSF budget in ten years is tempered by the failure of recent legislation to double the NSF budget in five years. The National Science Authorization Act of 2002, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush, called for a doubling of the NSF budget from FY 2002 to FY 2007. The annual appropriations bills have fallen far short of the doubling path specified in the NSF Authorization Act. The FY 2007 budget request for NSF is nearly $4 billion below the level authorized in the last doubling initiative."
There has been some movement in the House: http://www.ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=1182 but now we will see what happens in reality. Apparently it is possible to sound good without actually putting the money into it, we'll hope that doesn't happen again. The recent shift in power in the House and Senate might be helpful - we will see.
I don't know if the US as a population is supportive of research though. I would be very interested in a survey which attempts to gauge the public's interest and support for general research funding - does anybody know of a good one?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
"lol grammer"
lol spelling
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
USA was not dominant on the first half of the century.
.. actually the ONLY major american-born scientist I know from the last centyry are Robert Goddard and Richard Feynman.
Actually Adolf Hitler can be thanked for raising USA to "scientific domination"; Most jewish scientists fleed from central europe to USA because of nazis.
And some non-jewish german scientsts (like Werner von Braun) surrendered to USA when the war was ending.
Some european scientists why moved to USA between 1930 and 1945
Kurt gödel ( great mathematician )
Werner Von Braun ( main designed of V-2 ans Saturn V )
Albert Einstein( was visiting USA when hitler rose to power and because of that did not return to germany )
Paul Ärdös ( propably the most productive mathematician of all times, )
Stanislav Ulam, Polish, one of manhattan project scientists
Hans Bethe, nobel prize winner, manhattan project scientist
John Von Neumann, inventor the modern computer, manhattan project scientist
I am a computer scientist and faculty member at a Research 1 university.
As a few have said, IT IS THE CULTURE! I blame it on Anti-intellectual sentiment, pitiful teaching of math and science, and the fact that we don't have a big exploration goal.
I am not going to delve into anti-intellectual issue right now, but I would ask: What is the ratio of good scientists to evil scientists in movies?
In general, I have to say that we do a poor job in teaching math and science at all levels. There are many scapegoats here, but it's hard to imagine getting many good science teachers into schools without more pay and better environment. In the Universities, we have been importing scientists in many areas. As a culture, this is short sighted as it is unlikely to motivate US students into science. How are we to expect students in the University to be lured into science and math when they cannot relate to their professors and vice versa. Difficulties in communication and subtle racial/ethnic biases make it difficult for US students to see themselves as future professors. Students need role models.
The moon landings paid for themselves many times over in young scientists and engineers. We need some national goals that gives students a sense of purpose and appreciation. Why should I bust my hump for science when better paying, easier jobs exist? I could probably double my income in the private sector and work less, but I would lose my opportunity to work with fresh young students and help them see the beauties of learning new things.
More NSF grants will not solve the problem. Maybe if they are tied to developing domestic students into faculty--that could have a long term effect. The new Mars and moon efforts are good ideas, but the current administration doesn't have the credibility/vision of Kennedy to inspire America.
As you can tell, this is near and dear to my heart. I hope that we can do something with real effects. I do little things everyday, but I want to do more!
How about this: teach the bloody scientific method in all schools?
I was never formally presented with it during my public school education, which I find shocking. The US system
is filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay. I spent my school days bored out of my mind, until I went to
college, where even then I found the professors more interested in research than in teaching (and they certainly weren't
very good at it). All this was in an ivy league school, no less. We take children who love to learn (a child will almost drive you crazy
asking "why, why, why?" and bore the love of learning right the hell out of them. One college I toured had monitors halfway
back in the lecture halls so the students could see the teacher clearly at the blackboard. Totally pathetic. I think a system of
hypermedia and peer tutoring could reduce the number of teachers allowing for far fewer, much more talented, much better paid
teachers to oversee it all. I have a professor friend (much older) at a state school who earns a very good salary working about
10 hours a week. He's totally honest about being paid far too much for far too little; and he's got tenure.
We keep learning too abstract in the US. How about having young students work on real engineering projects where they
actually need trigonometry and statics & dynamics? Maybe have a dozen different projects they can participate on (a go-kart design
class, for example), where they can learn to work in groups and where the rubber will meet the road math-wise. I know
I would've taken to that approach like a fish to water. Of course, I'm an engineer, so I may be biased, but I believe everyone
should be trained as an engineer, since it really just boils down to solving problems with the available methods, which I
think is a useful skill for everyone to have, regardless of how good they are at it. I believe science will dominate humanity's future,
and that everyone who possibly can should go into it. Who knows which one of use will have that moment of revelation that
changes history forever? Even if it's in another country, innovation crosses borders soon enough.
The US had about a century's worth of head start, and we squandered it. Out-sourcing isn't about other country's stealing our
jobs, it's about why nations with much smaller degrees of wealth can produce graduates who can rival our best and brightest.
It's all on us: quit your whining, turn off the TV, and pick up a freakin' book. Given how our nation's been acting lately, our
losing our sole-superpower status is a good thing in my estimation.
Oh yeah, and get rid of the summer vacation thing. The agrarian society is over, so the number of kids working in the fields
is too small to penalize all the rest. We have too many farmers anyway, but that's the subject of another post...
Maxim
As others have said, the problem is with our elementary schools as well as high schools and colleges/universities. There is also the stupid idea that ANYTHING can be fixed by making some minor changes.
If you get into a big accident in your car, you KNOW the car will never be the same again, it just CAN'T be fixed properly. The American education system faces a similar situation.
Elementary schools are treated like a combination of one room schoolhouses where one teacher needs to instill a love of learning about every subject. It just doesn't work since no person loves Engish, History, Science, and Math to the point where they can really radiate an excitement for all of these subjects. The schools want/need to teach more subjects, but don't want to extend the school year and school day to the point where school is a full-time thing for students(with a bit more time off at different times of the year).
With dedicated math, science, english, and history teachers who love(or at least really enjoy) their subject, most students will tend to discover an interest in one or more of these subjects themselves. Without an interest in one or more subjects, schools are nothing more than a babysitting service while parents are out working.
It is unfortunate that most governments don't have leaders who understand that if something is seriously broken, doing a full replacement of the system as a whole is required. Here in the USA, what is needed is:
Shrink the summer vacation from 2-2.5 months down to 3 weeks, and to extend the school day to go from 8am to 4pm.
Get rid of elementary school and go to a system where different subjects have different teachers. To help younger students, the teachers can move from classroom to classroom instead of having the students go from room to room.
Focus on conceptual learning as well as memorization since understanding the why of things is generally more important in future problem solving than JUST being able to come up with the right answer.
Move school funding to being a part of income taxes, not just property taxes as well since those who rent instead of own tend not to pay into the school system.
If the above ideas are not enough, make it so you have 16 grades, not just 12. College should be where people go for EXTRA education, and should not be required to get most jobs. Now that the USA(and most of Europe for that matter) have shifted from blue collar/manufacturing jobs as the focus and have shifted to white collar educated jobs as the focus of the economy, that should be the focus for the minimum the standard public education system should have as a focus. If a public education system could be brought back to properly preparing students for most jobs, it would solve the problem.
Sure, our society de-values intellectual achievement vis-a-vis instant gratification and entertainment. However, as one who mentors secondary school students in engineering, I have seen first hand that those students who have even a slight inclination towards technology or science only take a little push to get them to pursue those interests.
My own daughter is a case in point. She has always been an artist and excelled in all her subjects, but until 8th grade had little interest in the physical world. That changed when she took a technology course with a very good instructor. He gives his classes challenges - mousetrap powered cars, egg drops, etc. and they go through what amounts to a full design cycle of problem definition, concept development, design, test and repeat, culmonating in a intra-class competition. He's pretty good at promoting these competitions and making it interesting for most students. Long story short, my daughter really got into her challenge: a CO2 powered crash sled with an egg cargo, and did pretty well in the competition. That, I think, was all it took to get her hooked.
When she got to high school, my daughter signed up for a robotics "club", kind of on a whim (but I'd bet her technology class experience helped her make the choice). Coincidentally (or maybe not), the club was led by the brother of the middle school teacher. The robotics club turned out to be a FIRST high school robotics team (Cybersonics, team 103, for those in the know), and consummed her life throughout her four years of high school.
She's now a sophomore in college, studying electrical and biomedical engineering. The biomedical part was another case of earlier inspiration - she took anatomy in high school and really liked it, too. She still paints for pleasure and gets A's in English, but knows her future is in biosensors, etc.
As I said, I mentor kids in engineering (through FIRST and team 103), and know that kids are not dumber now than when I was a kid - they just don't have things like the space race, displayed constantly and large in the media, to inspire them.
All it takes is a little push, and some of us are pushing instead of blaming foreigners and politicians.
...is the problem.
:)
Back In The Old Days (as they say in Cliché Magazine), you could make your own gunpowder and experiment with making your own model rocket engines and things like that. Doing these fun things as a kid leads to interest in later life for chemistry, electronics etc.
Now if you try and have some harmless fun you'd get into a whole bunch of trouble, because the powers that be can't distinguish between harmless experimenting and terrorism. Hell, in some parts of the states, you're not even allowed certain kinds of glassware, lest it be used for making drugs! How about nails? Should they be taken away lest I use them to nail people's heads?
And I suspect many people would be surprised by how many prominent figures in science have lead "interesting" childhoods.
The best scientists are the ones that did it as a child in their own time, and are inherently driven by their interest to find out more, make new discoveries, learn things. Not the people that did it as school because they couldn't think of anything else to do.
Westernised society has gone nanny/protectionist crazy, and you know what, it *will* suppress new talent.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
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Many CS papers make motivational statements like, "The typical sensor network has...". That's complete BS. The authors have no accurate way of knowing what a "typical" sensor network is like. Because they've never seen a study that's sampled the world's sensor networks. They write papers that quietly confuse what's *really* typical with what the authors imagine would be typical. So there are two problems: (a) academic dishonesty in their writing, and (b) not facing up to the fact that they're guessing about the relevance of their paper, rather than actually having a well-grounded sense of relevance.
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A nearly complete lack of statistical sensibility for simulations and performance characterizations. Hey computer science researchers: how do you know how many repetitions of a simulation to run before you draw your conclusions? Why don't you draw error bars around any numbers in your graphs that represent averaging over multiple repetitions? If you don't have good answers to these questions, then I think it's quite likely that your conclusions are neither reproducible nor sound.
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Leaps of logic regarding models. I can't count (maybe because I'm rather dull
;- ) the number of ad hoc routing papers I've read that assume a circular-coverage radio model, and yet the papers make no mention of the fact that such a model is known to generally have have no connection to reality http://www.cs.virginia.edu/papers/p125-zhou.pdf. And yet the NSF keeps on funding this crap and not holding the researchers' feet to the fire. If there's peer review before these papers get into journals, it's an indication that even the reviewers don't care about or realize that the research described in such papers has no demonstrated connection to the real world. It's almost as though (gasp) computer science researchers have so much fun dreaming up protocols and programming simulations that they can't be bothered with the pesky work of checking their assumptions or validating their results.
Until we computer science systems researchers stop doing crap, wasted research, it doesn't matter how many papers we produce. Because what matters it the amount of good research we do.This has nothing to do with slashing budgets. It has to do with the overall dumbing down of American school children.
The entire "No Child Left Behind" initiative would be more accurately called "Let's Weigh Down Our Brightest Kids With Some Fucking Morons".
It started when I was in school (80s) when people got their asses all in a twist about "tracking" students. If you're not familiar with that term, it basically means separating out the idiots and the trouble makers from the kids who actually have a chance. Of course, the slightly brighter parents of these sub-par offspring raised a huge stink about how it was damaging to their idiots to be segregated from the other children. The solution, of course, was to integrate them into all the classes. So, instead of a class full of bright kids doing something like dissecting frogs or building circuits you have 29 kids bored out of their fucking minds while the teacher tries relentlessly to impart Ohm's Law into some mouth-breathing fucktard.
My younger brother was in a "gifted and talented" class for all of 6 months (the entire length of the program) before somebody decided that he should be hobbled by other people's stupidity as well.
Also related to this entire fucking mess is the "why don't women do as well in science" question. The correct answer is "who gives a fuck", not "lets screw up the educational system to the point that NOBODY does well in science". Equality is not a fact of life, period. Some women are brilliant and excellent scientists, but they seem to be the exception in scientific fields. Respect them for their abilities, but don't turn all your resources towards teaching Sally _instead_ of Billy.
Things like that are why home schooled kids often seem so much brighter than public school ones these days. Not because of incapable public school teachers (although they exist), but more because of anti-educational policies that don't let them teach the ones who are willing and able to learn.
Harrison Bergeron was prophesy, and we're paying for it now.
Twenty years from now, experts doubt that America will remain a dominant force in science as it was during the last century.
/me cries. Do they actually enforce bad writing now?
That sentence tells me that in a score of years henceforth, beebo famulus's appointed "experts" will doubt if America will remain a dominant force within 100 years of the Earth's destruction.
Does anyone know who to write anymore?
Have you read my journal today?
The real problem is all the whackjobs who claim science doesn't exist, and we need to believe in magic and bad spirits which can be dispelled with a spraybottle filled with cooking oil and prayer.
When you have religious whackos trying to claim "intelligent design" is more valid than evolution, and that evolution is "just a theory"... and making sure they indoctrinate children into their stupidity... it's pretty hard to compete with countries who do not have religious whackjobs.
It's always saddened me that of all the freedoms granted to American citizens, most of us choose to practice the right to be stupid and ignorant.
This is not obvious? The educational system has failed many an American, and it is going to get worse if you yankees can't fix it. I'm regularly amazed at the number of Americans that don't know that China has a coherent written history that goes back more than two hundred years (the actual number is approximately a thousand depending on how you define it.), or that prior to the "Age of Enlightenment" in Europe that the Arabs were the engineering and research power-house. Eye surgeons in Dubai during the Dark Ages? Most Americans don't believe it was possible. If I had a drachma for every American who believes that the Wright Brothers were the first ones to fly I could probably buy every one of their government officials. I will not even consider the number of your university students who sincerely believe that most of your space program was an elaborate fake.
If you want a decent educational system inside the boundaries of the United States of America, you need to do the following:
- Vote for education, not for morons who think that science can be 'edited to fit policy'.
- Teach your children a work ethic instead of a "give me" ethic.
- Get involved in the education of your children. Pay attention to it.
- Support the teaching of sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, electronics, etc) at all levels.
- Stop expecting your school system to raise your children for you. Be a parent.
- Encourage analysis and in-depth research instead of rote parroting of 'facts' in schools.
- Stop litigating to force teaching to the "lowest common denominator" in your education system. It is a fact of life that intelligence is variable. Look at your politicians.
Just an outside observer.
It happened to.... yes, that's right, Soviet Russia. And it may happen to us as well. We need to collect the world's geniuses and make it attractive to be an American scientist, not push them away by making it hard to get visas.
3. The United States and its citizens needs to place as much importance and admiration on the sciences, and those who persue knowledge in them, as they do on sports players, movie stars, and "socialites".
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
There, you asked for it.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
... with persuing the one known road to success in Science. Education !
Let the nation laugh at Missouri (or whatever state it was) that wanted to define pi as 3 to make math easier for their students, at all those idiotic Bible-Belt states that insist upon trying to skew the curriculum with their religious dogma, at states that allow public funds to be spent on automobile racing tracks and professional sports stadiums while cutting funding for their school systems, at states that have year on year lowered the standard required to obtain a High School Diploma.
Go to Eastern Europe if you want to see who the US will competing with in Science in not 20 years but 5. Look at their curriculum, and the amazingly high level of general education they achieve with much less.
How about privatizing or moving to a Voucher system?
My Opinion:
All schools should be Semi-private with little or no goberment influence.
Vouchers are issued to Parents to choose the schools their kids go to.
Parents will choose schools based on academics, safety, discipline an success.
Grade schools should be rewarded on how well their students perform in middle school.
Middle schools should be rewarded on how well their students perform in High School.
High Schools should be rewarded on how well their students perform in college.
Colleges are rewarded by having the highest placement/employment rate of their graduates in the "real world".
Schools with teachers that CAN teach and have the highest achievement are rewarded with more students and more money. The better a schools students do "down the line" the bigger the $$ reward.
Each school has a vested interest in the success of it's students. As long as a student behaves, does the work, keeps the rules and stays out of trouble they have a right to stay in school.
Schools are required to provide classes, teachers and specialized teaching for students with learning difficulties or special needs.
Makes sense to me...
-sjamisoRC>
Wow. This is exactly the sort of emotionally charged irrational invective that (IMHO) is making it so hard to practice science in the US. Your heated response to two points (the claims that 1) more people voted against Bush than for him, and 2) even fewer would have voted for him had the media been more forthcoming/honest) contains...what? A rhetorical question about the color of the sky, a straw man about symmetry in election fraud, one explicit and two implicit ad hominim attacks, and absolutely nothing about the points you pretend to be responding to.
So let me show you how this whole logical argument thing is done:
The fact that, as you note, such incidents tend to be strongly correlated with Republican candidates winning is possibly a statistical fluke, unless you are wanting to suggest that there has been an organized effort on the part of the Republican party to subvert our democracy.
--MarkusQ
If your claims are correct, it sounds like one solution would be to dramatically reduce the debt that Americans accumulate in college. How do we do this? Well, we'd have to raise taxes on the nation as a whole, and redirect that wealth toward universities so that they could educate and perform research without charging (as much for) admission. We do some of it now, at both federal and state level. We could certainly do more.
End result: American degree holders graduate with much less debt, which seems like it would be good for everyone except MBNA.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
...give us free money, now! This is merely a budget-grab by an NGO. Happens all the time.
An environmental group says: "The earth is warming! We need a crash program to figure this out, right now! Trust us, we're a bunch of Ph.D., so we're way smart!".
Then an oil-industry consortium says: "We need more domestic oil and natural gas. We have to start drilling now, but we need to do it on land we don't own because we're all tapped out, and the economy is threatened. Trust us, all our expert geologists agree!"
A few lunches with a congressman, plus a campaign donation or two, and billions from the public treasury flow directly and indirectly into their hands.
This is called lobbying. Just because it's a group of "science educators" doing this doesn't mean they're not after personal gain (higher budgets, more grants, more status). They're just trying to get in on the gravy train that the U.S. Congress provides.
So much so that I wanted to post a reply, but couldn't figure out how. Luckily there's this company in India I was able to call ....
Bark less. Wag more.
while another advises that the National Science Foundation fund more graduate students and increase the amount of the fellowships.
Here they go again.
They're fixated on the supply while ignoring demand. The demand for technical people has dropped because we don't make things here any more. The R&D is done where things are made. A country that doesn't make stuff, doesn't need a bunch of scientists and engineers. Heck, we aren't using the ones we've already got. Why do they think graduating a bunch more will help? For the scientists and engineers, that'll make things worse.
The problem isn't the supply of labor, it's the supply of jobs. But the only ideas we ever hear are to "fix the schools."
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, but ultimately it makes no difference to the nation whether we raise or import our scientists and engineers, as long as we get the benefit of their advances first. IMHO the idea that the U.S. was at some time a powerhouse of home-grown scientists and engineers is a myth. Across the board, in every discipline you will find immigrants as well as born-Americans at the heart of our success.
Does anyone really care where Einstein, Teller, or Fermi (for example) were born? No, what matters is that we figured out nuclear technology first. America is a nation of immigrants and we should try very hard to resist the impulse to close ourselves off to it. If the next bioengineering genius is French I want to make it very attractive and easy for him to immigrate to the U.S. rather than stay in France.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
But the USA will always lead the way in the field of Creation Science.
Well, if Americans quit watching Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, major-league sports and other pointless wastes of time maybe their idle (not idol) brains could be put to better use. IMHO, I believe that competitions like FIRST should be broadcast on ABC, NBC, CBS during primetime and during sweeps week. And the prizes should be major...like full scholarships to major universities.
See chapter vi.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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').
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Why...that's almost as bad as letting kids develop their own ideas and not conform!
How are you going to have a properly subjugated populace if they can make good money WITHOUT family or political connections? What you advocate would bring chaos to our class structure and rob thousands of wealthy people of a tiny percentage of their horde. What are you, some kind of communist?
The feudal system was good enough for my ancestors, and by god it's good enough for me!
Apologists for exporting our standard-of-living have been repeating this mantra for years. I'm sorry to burst your education-is-the-answer bubble, but not everybody is going to get a PhD (or even Bachelor) in engineering. We will always have a large section of our society who, for whatever reason (aptitude or personal perference, poor choice, etc) will NOT go to college and will NOT become engineers. We still have to provide meaningful jobs that pay a living wage to these people. And retraining these folks into programers or network support (or whatever) means nothing if we are going to also export that job to India or import an H-1b to take it away in a few years.
Manufacturing jobs are typically not rock-bottom low-paying. They are often moderately-paying union jobs with health insurance, pensions, and fringe benefits. They are the kind of jobs that allowed the development of a broad-based lower-middle class that formed the backbone of American society in the 1900s. They are the kind of jobs that allow a guy to own a small house with a yard on an affordable mortgage with enough left over to have a decent standard of living.
I agree with Cluckshot's post that we are waging a trade war against our own citizens. We are exporting manufacturing blue collar jobs while importing cheap immigant labor to take the remaining blue collar jobs. And please don't repeat the racist lie that these are "jobs American's won't do". That is a lie. They will do them for decent pay, but not for peanuts. I have relatives who work in landscaping (cutting grass) in rural Missouri, which has almost no immigant labor. They make a modest but decent living. They wouldn't be able to make a living in Virginia (where I live), because it is teeming with cheap illegal immigrant labor that has pushed out the native workforce in those types of jobs. I have no doubt that native born americans would do that work in Virginia, if they weren't undercut by an illegal workforce that does not get paid benefits, often gets paid "under the table", and is not subject to labor law. We have placed our blue-collar citizens in an unregulated and unfettered global labor market that really is a "race to the bottom".
I am normally a free-trade libertarian, but I've come to realize that something is wrong. There is a famous quote attributed to Yogi Bera - it goes something like "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". In theory, and all other things being equal, trade will benefit both parties and increase the wealth of both. But in practice, all other things are not equal. This is where the ivory-tower economics of free-trade break down. There are just too many uncontrolled variables that their theories do not take into account. The largest uncontrolled varible is the dissimilar reglatory environoments between the US and the east asian economies. In China, free labor unions are outlawed, so workers can not bargin for higher wages or benefits as they could in a regulated true market economy (yes, true markets are also minimally regulated to preserve competition and bargining). Environmental and work safety regulations are unenforced, if they exist at all. This means that all the economic theories about efficiency and trade are blown out of the water. The classic theory is that if another country can make a good more efficiently, then it is good to close down the old inefficient factory and apply the resources to more efficient endevours. But China does not make goods more cheaply because they are more efficient. They make goods more cheaply because they have artificially low costs - no labor rights, can pollute to high-heaven without enforcement, and have a rigged exchange rate. That's not free trade, that's rigged trade.
I've digressed, so going back to the orig
3. The United States and its citizens needs to place as much importance and admiration on the sciences, and those who persue knowledge in them, as they do on sports players, movie stars, and "socialites"
That was the case in the 1950s. Baseball players made $6,000 to $10,000 per year. And they had to unionize to get that. The movie industry had the studio system, where actors were hired as employees under a deal which allowed them to be fired but not to quit and go to another studio. That lasted until 1954, and except for a very few performers, being a movie star didn't mean being rich. Musicians were doing even worse; the big money in music was being a band leader or a record company. People who inherited money but weren't good enough to make it themselves were derided as useless wasters and taxed at very high levels.
But physicists and electronics engineers were almost worshipped. They were the people who ended WWII. Understand what a big deal this was. Without radar, the Battle of Britain probably would have been lost. British Spitfires only had enough fuel for about twenty minutes of combat, so Fighter Command had to have accurate information about where the enemy bombers were, or the fighters would be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Without the atomic bomb, defeating Japan would have been a long, bloody slog. Invading and conquering Japan was expected to be at least as big a job as invading and conquering Europe had been; harder because the distances were longer, bloodier because the landing area was totally hostile, unlike France. Then, one day, the US dropped the Bomb. And suddenly it was all over. (Read Thank God for the Atomic Bomb, by Paul Fussell. Fussell today is a famous essayist, but in 1945, he was an infantryman who'd been in combat and was part of the army getting ready for the invasion of Japan.)
That's how we got Big Science. Big Science was invented to win WWII, and it paid off. Big time. It continued to pay off during the 1950s and 1960s, with jet aircraft, computers, rockets, nuclear power, antibiotics, color TV - things that affected daily life.
We've been there. It's over in the US. Today, in China, being an engineer means a much better life than most of the people around you. That's why they're on the way up and we're on the way down.
This kind of good-natured banter was what kept grammar and spelling nazis' spirits up during the long cold winters on the east front.
Yes I have at one time or another contributed to NASA Research.
Wow. Thats very interesting. See, I just made up that part, I didn't think you actually had claimed it.
You're completely off your rocker, you do know that?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.