Slashdot Mirror
Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort
In a speech at the White House today, President Obama launched a new campaign, "Educate to Innovate," designed to get American students fired up about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The full text of the speech is also available on whitehouse.gov. "The new campaign builds on the President's Inaugural Address, which included a vow to put science 'in its rightful place.' One of those rightful places, of course, is the classroom. Yet too often our schools lack support for teachers or the other resources needed to convey the practical utility and remarkable beauty of science and engineering. As a result, students become overwhelmed in their classes and ultimately disengaged. They lose, and our nation loses too. The partnerships launched today aim to change that. They respond to a challenge made by the President in April, when he spoke at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences and asked the nation's philanthropists, professional and educational societies, corporations, and individuals to collaborate and innovate with the goal of reinvigorating America's STEM educational enterprise. The partnerships announced today — dramatic commitments in the hundreds of millions of dollars, generated through novel collaborations and creative outreach activities — are just the first wave of commitments anticipated in response to his call."
America's artistic value continues to decline with each hollywood blockbuster to be released. No studies whatsoever have been made to test if it could possibly be correlated to poor schooling in the fields of Language Arts, Drama/Theatre, and Humanitarian studies.
Up Next, a story about how a 3 legged dog saved a baby.
still can't compete with PS, Xbox, Wii, DS, etc.
Which is why we're heading towards second-world country status.
I void warranties.
Massive cash awards to US scientists. These kids choose not to go into science because it is not cool. Why is it not cool? Lots of hardwork and small incomes. If you give scientists boat loads of money, they become cool.
Instead we will waste another $huge_amount dollars on some lame education effort only to have the kids still want to be Kobe Bryant, or Dr. Dre.
Now we can give Obama the Nobel prize for Chemistry and Physics as well!
ws
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
...designed to get American students fired up about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
No offense, Mr. President, but you want to know what really gets us fired up about those things? Getting paid for it. There are a select few of us that are willing to work for peanuts making the world a better place, spending hours working intractable problems, and sacrificing our social and sex lives all for the sake of The Greater Good. The rest of us -- we want to be paid for our work. The work isn't glamorous -- it's demanding, thankless, and for most requires an expensive education that they aren't reimbursed for. This field in particular (information technology) was gutted about seven years ago under the last administration in the name of short term profits. There is no R&D budget left for innovation, and not much has happened that's revolutionary in this industry since the bubble burst.
If you want to showcase our science and technology, start by making this country the best place to be for it once again -- rather than watching as Europe turns on the LHC while ours sits half-finished in Texas. Send some money to the Department of Energy to fund some physics over here. Give some grant money out so we can deploy a successor to the internet that doesn't suck, controlled by private interests who only want to sell us viagra, cheap thrills, pay per view, and piss-poor last mile connections. Put us back in space, which was once a source of national pride and now languishes as an embarassment. And cancel Enterprise -- goddamn that show sucks!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Adam Savage from Mythbusters was present, and twittered about the day's event, including being mentioned in Obama's speech and even posted a photo or two of meeting him and Dean Kamen.
I really think someone should bring back Public Service Announcement education (a la "Schoolhouse Rock") in a big way. Keep the lessons small and bite-sized, fit them into 30 second spots. Just keep banging away simple concepts that are aimed at middle-schoolers and adults who forgot all of that stuff. Using simple math to figure out gallons of paint required for a wall of a given size. Linking fuel purchased to pollution created in numbers. Explaining the difference between anecdotes versus statistical norms, like the recent breast-cancer-screening recommendations. Illustrating the kinds of technology Europe, Asia and the Americas had in 1400 AD or 1600 AD or 1800 AD. Heck, even just quoting and explaining each of the Constitutional Amendments during shows like "24 Hours" or "CSI" would have a profound impact in the long run.
[
We should set up small groups around the country to independently engage in the study of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math... call them STEM Cells, and watch the right-wingers line up to ban funding them, on reflex.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Unless the proposal includes some tactics for getting the parents involvement, it'll be doomed before it starts. Education happens outside of the classroom just as much as in it and a child's mindset regarding education (no matter the field) is strongly influenced by their parents' mindset.
I went to the city because I wished to live without deliberation.
Parents, parents, parents.
They are in the best position (or should be!) to motivate their kids. If they can't, no billion dollar program will either.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Yet too often our schools lack support for teachers or the other resources needed to convey the practical utility and remarkable beauty of science and engineering.
This looks like a job for...Sagan-Man!
More top down central planning of the government schools isn't going to lead to more productive outcomes. Science isn't a rigid, unchanging system that can be taught as dogma. Instead of throwing another stifling straitjacket onto the failed government schools, he might emulate the diverse and decentralized environment of scientific achievement, and allow competition with government schools, and competing curricula that will over time lead to increasingly more beneficial outcomes.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
You mean, his anti-stem cell research policy where he shrunk the previous administrations budget of $0.00 to several millions. Is that the anti-stem cell research policy you are talking about? I guess you would have been much happier if he just kept the previous administrations spending level on this research.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The teacher unions complained loud and early about this plan. They pushed hard for (and eventually) got numerous changes to the original proposal.
Most of my kids' teachers have been good people generally interested in educating kids. The unions, on the other hand, are out of touch with the classroom and mostly interested in their own survival.
Sorry to be so cynical - and I only speak from personal experience - but I have yet to see the unions fight to get their way about something (tenure, testing methods, school hours, curriculum, etc.) and get a positive result in the end. And with this much money at stake...
Not going to happen.
A post-doc doing biomedical research (which is the highest-paid field) makes $40k at NYU. This is after spending 4 years in college, and then doing research for 6 years making a $25k/year stipend. With a conversion rate of under 1 percent for faculty positions (which don't pay that much more anyway), why in the world would anyone actually do that to themselves?! You'd have to be REALLY driven to want to work 60+ hour weeks, under the perpetual stress of having your grant pulled, for less than subway ticket clerks make.
Even better, in our new future we'll hamstring doctors and nurses pay, and make sure that nobody gives a damn about that kind of science too.
As for physics and chemistry (and I am not even talking about Mathematics), we've already driven them into the ground. No need to worry any further.
I was going to say stop paying executives and lawyers so much.
But then I realized an even more fundamental problem.
Science is hard. Degrees are expensive in the U.S.
Knowing science does not result in either good pay or security.
So smart people choose other fields which require boots on the ground, better security, and better social status.
Only suckers do science right now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
As for physics and chemistry (and I am not even talking about Mathematics), we've already driven them into the ground. No need to worry any further.
The problem is there just isn't a big market for science. I really can't advise anyone to take science at all. Not for money anyway.
There is however a big market for Quants.
Deleted
The silver bullet for education is very simple: Fix society. There's nothing inherently wrong with our schools. The problem is that schools are nothing but a microcosm of our society. We think that because schools are full of kids we have some special control over them, but that's generally not true. Kids learn what to value first from their parents, second from their role models (which are usually popular media figures), third from their peers, and only then from teachers. It's even worse when you think you can control teenagers who are not children.
Parents that do not value education produce kids that do not value educations. Parents with no ambitions produce kids with no ambitions. A society that values fame and fortune over science and progress produces kids that value fame and fortune over science and progress.
Quite simply, sick schools are a symptom of the real disease, a sick society. Of course few want to admit our society is sick, and even fewer want to make an effort to fix it. They'd rather just pretend that there's a magic trick to turning blank children (who aren't really blank) into perfect adults. Well sorry adults, but a) kids will turn out fine without you trying to "fix" them, and b) YOU are the real problem. We have to do what we want kids to do: We have to take responsibility and try to fix things instead of pushing problems onto somebody else, i.e. another generation.
Fix society, and you fix schools. It's that simple. Fixing society isn't that simple? Tough. Either do it or stop complaining about schools.
To you and people who think like that (sibling post by techno-vampire going even further in this)... I'd like to note that there is a reason why we need standardized tests. If each school acts on it's own, some might become better than now, others worse. You could look at two people's papers and not know how good they are compared to each other unless you are well familiar of quality of every school in the country. We really need standardized tests to fix this, to give some guideline with which to compare students' knowledge to others.
Your argument is really not that much against standardized tests. It is against badly used standardized tests, which can be fixed if it is made into a priority. I can't comment on this one as I'm not from USA and have never gone through such. However, here in Finland there are pretty few standardized tests but they are important: At the end of highschool you are put to national tests about each subject (a group of good teachers evaluate all tests without knowing to whom they belong to or even what school are the exam takers from) and everyone gets a grade relative to others. On each year, 5% best get the best grade, those who aren't in 5% but are in 20% get the next best one... Of course there are some variations (a score that would have been just enough for the best grade on one year could be just below the limit on the next) but overall it gives a pretty good result.
If people from one highschool consistently get lower grades, the school get a bad reputation and nobody wants to go there. Publicly funded schools (=practically every single one) get funded based on how many students graduate so schools have some interest to compete with other schools when it comes to quality of education.
Obama is a member of the One World Order muslim kenyan atheist conspiracy and is only interested in promoting America-Last policies like Darwinism, heliocentrism, and rational thought.
YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!
>>>Republican pundits would say as much about Democratic proposals for U.S. universal health care.
- We believe in the right to get health or sickcare.
- We also believe in the right to choose smoking, drinking, or overeating.
- We even believe you have the right to replace your damaged lung, liver, or fatty heart.
What we do NOT believe is that you can force your neighbors to pay the bill. Most Americans consider that theft of another man's labor. We are amazed that Europeans do not. If you wanted to make a "safety net" to help-out those who can't afford their own care, fine, but 99% of Americans have enough money to pay the bill themselves and should do so.
Also the "40 million American are uninsured" is only half the story. The other half of the story is that 30 million of those Americans are uninsured but covered by government programs like SCHIP and Medicare. The remaining ones are illegal intruders (non-citizens).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Corp america doesn't care how many millions of kids become engineers or scientists. It'll always be cheaper to hire an engineer in India/China than in the US. My company (large IT company), hasn't had any layoffs, but all the hiring that has been happening has been overseas. So when the CEO gets on the quarterly call and says that the company has continued to hire people; he leaves out the little footnote about how 90% of them are overseas.
You have a good point about the tedium pace and monotony of our day to day jobs. As a recent college grad I feel exactly where you are coming from. So I have a question for you, or anyone else on here who has some ideas. How do we fix that as well? How do reengineer the workplace structure, at any level, to make work less suck and more awesome? Honestly, I am not asking to troll, I am seriously curious. I don't have an answer...at least not a full one. I have some ideas, but I would be interested in other folks' ideas as well. How do we make work less crappy? Any takers?
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
The Quality Counts report, a publication from Editorial Projects in Education, which publishes the trade magazine Education Week, rated the 50 states and the District in six areas of education performance and policy.
The District was ranked 51st in the report
Maybe we should return control of local school systems back to local school boards. And let Congress and the DOE control only the DC school system. When the DC school system is ranked among the top 25 then perhaps we might want to pay attention to the example set by Washington. Pay attention to the example - not do as they say. Under local control, some schools would undoubtably do better, some might do worse, but DC is dead last right now - so even your religious nutjob nightmare districts are still likely to do a better job than the nations capital.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
The remaining ones are illegal intruders (non-citizens).
That's a very good point, it's a known fact non-citizens and illegal immigrants don't get sick or need help in any way. Those damn cyborg immigrants, not only are they stealing our jobs, parking their cars on their lawns and fucking our wives behind our backs, but they're also immune to pain and disease! It's just unfair.
I've been to different parts of the world where kids have much less to learn with and yet reach very high in education. They have a value in their home that causes them to strive for the most. Here in America, there is much less emphasis placed on how hard we must try, because ultimately, if you drop out and do nothing, the government will still give you a home, food, and soon all the health care you may need. In other places in the world, if you don't try hard the government will give you nothing and watch you starve.
Let be honest with ourselves, we're not going to be really striving hard until it is essential for survival...like it is in most of the rest of the world. We're our own worst enemy in making life easier and easier and requiring less and less effort. It seems that we ultimately desire to just sit back and let the world feed us while we just monitor the computer screen and get paid lots of money.
Throw all the money you want at school, but ultimately I'm for looking the parents straight in the eye and asking them what they're doing.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
99% do not have the money to pay for their own care, the reality is most private bankruptcies are the result of a medical issue.
We are paying for their medical care, like it or not, who do you think pays when the patient files bankruptcy?
Our system is so messed up I have turned down better paying jobs due to the cost of their insurance.
We have health discount plans not insurance. I do not need someone to pay every time I get the sniffles, I need millions in case I get brain cancer. Instead we have the worst of both worlds.
Wait --- let me get this straight: you're actually claiming that education is actually a political ploy to garner more support for the left? You're actually arguing that science education is a bad thing because it encourages parents to be lazy? Therefore we shouldn't teach kids, and that'll show them unions and pinko parents? Never mind that we're falling further and further behind other nations in science: the solution, on the planet you live on, is to teach less science.
You're arguing that your partisan gain is more important than the success of the next generation, and that it's all right to doom them to ignorance if it helps the GOP.
Get out of your chair, go sit in your hummer, and without leaving your garage, turn it on and listen to Mike Savage until you fall into a deep, permanent sleep. You are a monster and a sociopath. You have no place in society, and the rest of us would be better off without you.
Spin that with your broad generalizations about the left and a hilariously old reference to Hillary Clinton's book just shows that you're hopelessly mired in ideological cliches with no objective reasoning whatsoever...something I might add is important when discussing science.
I, on the other hand, am actually happy that government is actually paying attention to science and not making an enemy of it.
The other half of the story is that 30 million of those Americans are uninsured but covered by government programs like SCHIP and Medicare. The remaining ones are illegal intruders (non-citizens).
You left out lawful tax-paying immigrants not yet naturalized, and you also left out people whom all the available insurance companies have declined to cover due to a preexisting condition.
Warning! Anecdotal evidence ahead, my own two cents, etc....
My wife is a teacher now for 6 years and from what I can make of it, teachers are there own worse enemy when it comes to any improvements in the schools. They regularly resist any change, argue over almost any point, and back stab each other the smallest perceived slight. I think, at least in part, its comes from just a lot of burn out and frustration with students, but as I said this comes to be second hand from my wife so I know I don't have the clearest view.
My wife was an accountant and got her MBA before deciding to get out of the corporate life and to take up teaching. She went through an accelerated course to get her teaching degree. Now teaching business at the high school level for several years, but continues to be look down on by many of the teachers at the school. She didn't get a normal degree in education, she one of the "transplants". Such narrow mindedness....
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
Funny you should propose that, it was proposed in the brilliant Yes Prime Minister series.
See below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP-9WzAh26Y
You sure about your numbers there? I for one have been one of the uninsured, both ineligible for government programs, and not an "illegal intruder." I know lots of people in the same boat, certainly enough to doubt that we round to zero.
The remaining ones are illegal intruders (non-citizens).
I'm not sure whether to parse it as a badly worded way to say "illegal intruders (who are all non-citizens)", or whether you're implying that all non-citizens on U.S. soil are "illegal intruders".
If the latter, I would like to remind you that e.g. non-citizen H1-B guys also pay taxes that support your socialized healthcare programs in full, same as all citizens, except that they aren't entitled to any benefits from those programs.
"What I do NOT believe is that you can force your neighbors to pay the bill."
FTFY.
What he really means "I am a heartless selfish asshole who would rather watch unfortunate poor people die in the gutter than pay a pittance for a decent universal health care scheme".
I pay into 1.5% of my salary above 30K Australias universal health care and am happy to do so. It works very well. We have good health care for everyone. If you want private insurance you can have that too, and get a tax rebate.
Our government spends less to give universal health care than yours does to NOT provlde it.
Drink the republican kool-aid much.
not sit back and watch as my Obama-money comes pouring in while watching Oprah
Yep... and then distort it even further if you can get away with it?
not the land of hand-outs for not trying
Check. Now can the GOP continue on and show that they have no grasp on how the rest of the world funds education and operates their national budgets?
In most of the world, they are passing us up because their lives depend on them doing well and getting a job to earn money. Without it, they starve.
That is an excellent start. Can you drive home the distortion now by belittling people who didn't crawl out of the correct vagina and find themselves born into wealth?
With more and more fallback in America, we slowly reduce the incentive to do anything. Ultimately, the government (via taxing the rich) will give me everything I ever want whether I try or not.
Yeah, we see why the conservatives deserve to be in power now. They will ensure that only the rich and richer have money. If anyone else can't make enough money to improve their own situation, it must be only their own fault, period. Clearly the free market has solved all of our problems so brilliantly in the past 8 years, we want more of that.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
And Asia one day will be where we are.
Don't forget your history. In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, scientists and technicians were practically revered in this country. We valued the idea(l) of progress, and were convinced that we could improve our lives through the application of knowledge. And we did. Learning was valued, and science was respected.
That's all changed now, of course. But respect for learning isn't a uniquely Asian cultural phenomenon: rather, it's what you see in a society after it's become prosperous, but before it's become decadent.
Actually, the rest of the goddamn civilized world shows us that the system we're trying to build here is the one that actually works, and it is ours that is the known-broken one.
But I don't expect ideologues like you to apply reason to these things. After all, America, Fuck Yeah!
When Tony Blair came to power a decade ago he listed his three priorities as "Education, Education, Education". Since that time New Labour have lowered standards in education to the point where school leavers are now totally unemployable and near illiterate. The UK education system renders most children unemployable and 20% of youths between the age of 16 and 24 are currently out of work. I was interested in becoming a teacher at one point but after visting a secondary school and seeing what was being taught I was completely put off the idea. GCSE students were learning what I would expect to be taught in a primary school and the textbooks were filled more with New Labour propaganda than anything of value. With no skills it's little wonder none of them can get a job upon leaving education.
So, what does any of this have to do with President Obama? Like New Labour Obama is obsessed with "Equality for all" and where there is not equality he will create false equality. Instead of accepting that all men are not created equal and that students have widely differing levels of academic ability he will force a false equality. The only way you can force equality in education is to lower standards to the level of the least gifted student, and at that point everyone will attain the same incredibly low standard of education thus total equality.
Tony Blair did exactly what Obama is doing now, making s speeches about the importance of science with his usual sound bites like the future is “lit by the brilliant light of science”. Now there is absolutely no science being taught UK schools, at least nothing anyone here would call science. Science can be very complicated and if some students don't understand it then we won't have "Equality for all" so it has to be discarded from the curriculum. In order to achive his "Equality for all" Obama will have to do exactly what New Labour has done and I therefore expect that Obama will do for the US education system what Tony Blair and Gorden Brown have done for the UK.
While everyone likes to criticise the Chinese government they have undoubtedly got their education system bang on right, separating students into different schools by ability and pushing the most gifted students to achieve in education. With a solid foundation of knowledge these highly educated individuals will go on to make the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the future, and China will reap the economic benefits associated with these breakthroughs. Meanwhile in the west our children won't even be able to write their names and western civilisation will collapse into poverty.
"Equality for all" doesn't work and any attempts to force it, particularly in education, will destroy a nation.
With our modern obsession with applicability and utility, where nothing seems to mean anything unless it makes money, we need to remember what science really is. Science isn't just a collection of facts. It isn't just an engine of economic growth. Science is above all a method of exposing nonsense for what it is. Science provides a method for anyone to identify truth from nonsense. When a dispute arises over whose assertions about the physical world are correct, we all agree to look to the physical world as the ultimate arbiter of truth, not to a priest, nor a CEO, nor a minister. Science cannot prove truth. It can only disprove nonsense.
If we, as citizens of a democracy, lose the ability to tell nonsense from truth, then our civilization is in trouble.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I'll readily agree with you that we have some lousy teachers, but the problems go far beyond them. Unions sink any disruptive reform that threatens their status or wealth, for instance. But there are deep structural problems with our very method of education, starting with the education major itself in colleges. We should frankly chuck education degrees for junior high and high school teaching. And there's no getting around the fact that education majors in most colleges are almost always from the lowest tier of ACT/SAT scores. We could debate all day about the virtues and vices of government involvement in education.
But equally as big is the problem of students and their parents. Frankly, lots of people simply don't care about schooling. Many parents see school mainly as a place to get rid of their kids for 7 hours a day. Most kids see school as a chore to be endured, from one degree to another.
Look at countries like Finland, where they spend less per pupil and less on facilities than we do. Their kids spend fewer days in school per year and fewer hours in class per day, and fewer years in what we would call the K-12 system. And yet they outgain US kids in all phases of standardized testing. Why? Simply put, there's a culture of responsibility.
Until we find a way to change attitudes among parents and kids, all of the money and legislation in the world won't make a difference.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
you're actually claiming that education is actually a political ploy to garner more support for the left?
... and investing in the next round, when he'll need organized labor even more, since a lot of independents are going to be WAY more skittish this time around.
No. I'm saying that the teachers' unions are dependable voters for Obama's party, as long he continues to throw them a bone in the form of money and power of far-reaching programs that involve the continued employment of their members under their terms. Education (especially as it relates to science) doesn't stick in a kid's head because of large government programs. It sticks in their heads because their parents have made them receptive to it in the first place. Big government programs don't cause parents to be more thoughtful about how they interact with their own kids.
Obama knows this, just like every educator knows this. Which makes large, money-centric programs like this all about the people to whom the money goes: the unions. And the unions then take the dues they collect, and advertize on behalf of the politician than promises to deliver more of the same. Such unions were a big part of how Obama got elected, and he's doing payback, that's all
You're arguing that your partisan gain is more important than the success of the next generation
No. I'm saying that such programs have nothing to do with the success of the next generation, and are in fact all about the partisan gains pursued by the party dishing out the cash. Simple as that. Of course, you already knew that.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That expression goes back way before she trotted it out, and it's still being used, ad nauseum. Google it.
Of course this is true, but context is everything. Seeing that you threw this in during your general rant against liberals and then capitalized the words, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what you're implying.
More to the point of your question though is that you never do address the very thought of what you think is wrong with science education, which is the only way to have proper science education is get the parents involved. So how do you propose to do this, pray tell? Wave some magic wand to make parents who are too set in their ways to somehow imbue them with the necessary curiosity and objectivity to pass it on to their kids?
But the government proposes a plan to spur science education and your fault is with the people who proposed it. Might as well throw up your hands and admit you either 1) don't think there is anything wrong with science education today or 2) admit that we cannot possibly change the status quo and give up. Seriously, I would love to hear your proposal to get all parents more involved with their children's education. I don't think you have any idea on how that can be accomplished, but if you have something, I'm all ears.
Really? You stop being interested when you're reminded that your current president's only executive experience prior to his current OTJT, was his holding of that title? Yeah, I can see why you'd rather not be reminded of that.
Seriously? This doesn't have a thing to do with the topic. And who cares about this unless you have some sort of cognitive dissonance about who got elected into office. Obviously, this weak argument didn't hold enough water during the campaign, you think I give a shit about it now?
If you listen to Fox News long enough, you'll be able to simultaneously believe that Obama is an Atheist, Muslim, Indonesian, Kenyan, a radical black Christian, and . . . have they gotten around to him being a reptoid yet?
Doublethink is a form of trained, willful intellectual blindness to contradictions in a belief system. Doublethink differs from ordinary hypocrisy in that the "doublethinking" person deliberately had to forget the contradiction between his two opposing beliefs — and then deliberately forget that he had forgotten the contradiction. He then had to forget the forgetting of the forgetting, and so on; this intentional forgetting, once begun, continues indefinitely. In the novel's notes, Orwell describes it as "controlled insanity".
-- Wikipedia on Doublethink.
Ah, the same tired and inaccurate claim.
Ever hear of the cochlear implant, developed in OZ?
We punch significantly above our weight in the medical research area.
Does the US govt PAY for that supposed 82%?
How much is done by big pharma, for huge profits?
You cant count that as govt spending you know.
In fact according to the study I just looked up;
We identified 1 485 749 articles published by authors from the European Union and the four candidate countries and 1 356 805 articles published by US authors.
See;
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1179763/table/tbl1/
Funny that looks like Eurpoe is more than 50%.
Seems you have poosted a classic case of 85% of statistics are made up on the spot.
How about using a credible source of information instead of getting your"facts" from Fox news?
I disagree with your other 50%. The other 50% of the problem is parents who steadfastly refuse to guide their children expecting the school system to become defacto parents, all the responsibility but none of the authority. Teachers (myself included) for the most part desperately want the kids to do better. But when little Johnny has a diet disproportionately consisting of Sugar, does not get enough sleep, doesn't study as much as others, and I can go on and on. When a parent isn't doing their job, the teachers job is infinitely more difficult. The problem with American education is American culture.
load "$",8,1
Ouch, can you say "out of touch" even more loudly?
but 99% of Americans have enough insurance and/or other coverage to pay the bill themselves and should do so.
There, fixed that for you friend.
Disclaimer: I'm Australian. I'm glad my kids won't starve just to pay medical bills. And, right or wrong to your way of thinking, I'll happily pay for that security in my taxes
And that kids is how I met your mother.
Culture is both a cause and a consequence. Parents might magically wake up and start talking to their children about the wonders of science. Or they might not. But culture can also be another tool in the government toolkit (e.g. religion).
Your fantasy of an evil controlling nanny state versus the rebellious freedom-fighter parents is just that: a fantasy. Sometimes the government is doing something that should be done, and sometimes not; sometimes parents are doing what should be done, and sometimes not. I think everyone recognizes by now that most people don't spend time exciting their kids about science, and so the ability to reason and think clearly is declining. Hence, it's forward-thinking for someone with the power and responsibility of the President of the US to increase science and mathematics education. I don't see how any clear-thinking person could be against this.
Simplified models beget simplified thinking.