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How US Schools' Culture Stifles Math Achievement
Zarf writes "I'd like to file a bug report on the US educational system. The New York Times reports on a recent study that shows the US fails to encourage academic talent as a culture.'"There is something about the culture in American society today which doesn't really seem to encourage men or women in mathematics," said Michael Sipser, the head of M.I.T.'s math department. "Sports achievement gets lots of coverage in the media. Academic achievement gets almost none."' While we've suspected that the US might be falling behind academically, this study shows that it is actually due to cultural factors that are devaluing the success of our students. I suspect there's a flaw in the US cultural system that prevents achievement on the academic front from being perceived as valuable. Could anyone suggest a patch for this bug or is this cause for a rewrite?"
It really boils down to the fact that Beavis and Butthead trumped Ferris Bueller. We are living in the aftermath of that cultural selection. Bread and circuses my friends. Bread and circuses.
Physics is still slightly fun because it involves mechanics and going to space. Even then, you need a pretty savvy physics teacher, and they are hard to come by (they all go to law school).
Math is dead mainly because computers are so good at it, and students are usually better with computers than their teachers are, hence it just feels like a huge waste of time with no rewards.
Scrap math and teach programming and math as a subtext. But now the problem is in the tools because all the corporations rip off the school system by making them buy unnecessarily expensive toys.
Schools need 100 dollar laptops that are 1. safely online, 2. fully programmable, and 3. composed of 100% free software. Scrap textbooks. All texts can be wikiped-ized, and the savings there will make up for the computers 10 fold. Students will program all the tools they need, knowledge will be googled and researched, not memorized, and students can concentrate on building and analyzing skills rather than imitation copy and paste automatons.