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Taking Issue With Claims That American Science Education is 'Dismal'
TaeKwonDood writes "We've all seen the stories about how 'dismal' science education in America is. It turns out that it's kind of a straw man. America has long led the world in science but the 'average' score for Americans on standardized tests has never been good. Instead, every 2 years American kids get better but we keep being told things are terrible. Here is why."
The whole science vs religion thing is a straw man. The idea of the rational unbiased scientist is also somewhat mythological. This history of the big bang theory, the current prevailing cosmological theory on the original of the universe, is quite insightful. The theory was offered by a Roman Catholic priest. Some of the leading scientists of the day dismissed this theory merely because it was developed by a priest, they dismissed it as "smelling of creationism".
If you want to make a claim that some group is anti-science it would be accurate to say that *some* churches may be so. The truth is that many other churches are perfectly fine with science. That scientific observations and discoveries are not in conflict with faith. Again, the whole notion of the universe originating in a big bang billions of years ago came from a priest. The western tradition of the scientific method was promoted by a bishop and other members of the clergy. The Roman Catholic church operates a world class observatory doing serious cosmological research in cooperation with other leading world class universities.
To say that religion is anti-science, well, that seems to display a mindset awfully similar to some preacher claiming that the earth was created six thousand years ago. Both comments delivered with absolute authority and passion, both comments being objectively and demonstrably false, both comments none the less held as as articles of *faith* of their respective mindsets. Reality if far more complicated than either of these mindsets believe.
Maybe if "we" got out of the mindset of wanting to pay third world wages, people would move to these kinds of fields?
It is funny, in my opinion, the ones to the greatest extent setting wages ( trying to keep them low ) seem to be the ones lamenting the fact that people don't want those jobs, and all the while praising the market for all the magic it can do ( and it can ).
The union problem is not necessarily teacher salary. There might be a problem where some teachers make little to no contribution to benefits like health care and retirement, but that is a really complicated issue that can't be generalized. Contracts can vary from place to place, some reasonable, some not. The real union problem is probably union support for teachers who are not good teachers. The unions no longer seem to be the guardians of their craft, enforcing their own high standards of quality upon their members. Unions used to kick out members who couldn't perform to high standards. Today some claim that some union leadership is essentially a part of the educational bureaucracy protecting the status quo.
The US has been able to attract top notch scientists that speak english for a long time. As essentially the wealthiest country of the lot, and english forming the biggest scientific block there's a natural advantage there. The US also has universities that can pay top scientists relatively large amounts of money. I'm in canada and the university I'm at (and the department I'm in) have had two professors who are particularly well renowned in their field, with several prestigious awards. But they get paid the same as everyone else, because there's no room to give them extra money. We are fortunate their spouses have low mobility jobs. One passed away due to heart attack earlier this year so we're down to one. But either way. If they were in the US they'd be easily making 250k and potentially up over 300k whereas here they're stuck at 120 ish. There are only a handful of universities in canada, the UK etc that can pay a premium for premium staff, and even then they can only afford a small group of them, because they charge the same per student as we do. (This would be, in canada. University of Toronto, U of British Columbia, in the Uk Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and a few others). In the US Harvard can have as many 400k/year staff as it wants.
In terms of actual scientific output the US isn't in a bad place, unless you consider reliance on foreign born scientists a problem (which it sort of is, and sort of isn't). Where they're always struggling is in science education at lower levels. And even there, there's only so much you can do. If you need 300k people to work assembly lines and 3000 to design the cars that are made on the lines there's only so much motivation for people to be scientifically literate anyway. When you have a political party that institutionally ignores science there's a reinforcement mechanism for generations of people to not learn, and be proud of not learning.
Did you even READ the frickin' question in the poll? Your conclusion is not based on the evidence.
Did you? It's actually worse than portrayed. When asked directly "Do you think Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years is definitely true, probably true, probably false, (or) definitely false?", 39% said definitely true and another 27% said probably true.
If that's not outright rejecting the scientific thought process, I don't know.