Self Esteem vs Reality
This does not bode well…
Top Defense Scientists Send Out S.O.S. for Scientists and Engineers
I’ll skip to the kicker:
The decline in teaching our children in STEM fields –science, technology, engineering, and math—is frightening. Just look at the facts: According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a more level comparison from country to country, U.S. eighth-graders science scores ranked 11th against many Asian countries and Russia. It goes downhill by the time high school graduation arrives with a rank of 25 against 34 other nations. Chinese students have an 89 percent college admission rate, higher than America’s 70 percent. Narrowing the focus on science and engineering:
- India graduates 230,000 engineers every year, another 50,000 earn master degrees and still another 20,000 earn a doctorate.
- The U.S. graduates about 7,000 engineers each year, but 55 percent are earned by foreign students. Another 3,000 earn master degrees and a mere 9,000 earn a doctorate.
It’s difficult to get verifiable numbers from China, but I would suspect that they are closer to India’s than ours.
Of course, what the author calls STEM fields require students to deal with facts, and 2+2=4 kinda stuff. No blue ribbon just for showing up.
Category: Geezer Alert!
I swear I’ve been hearing this same story for decades, and yet when I’ve looked up who gets awarded Nobel science prizes or who holds patents for innovative technologies, it seemed the U.S. continued to lead – and not by a small margin. Not meaning to belittle the importance of comparative test scores, but it’s what one does with one’s skills and knowledge that I care about.
Alice, there has been a decades long movement to dumb down education. Even the leftist academics are sick of it yet the “self esteem” movement has taken root in education. One prof I had advised against grading with red pens because of the “social stigma” of red marks.
Thankfully the fail of OWS and the changing economy will put STEM back where it belongs and this self esteem crap will join “new math” in the rubbish bin….
Alice–that’s because when it comes to the elites, we’re still up there. When it comes to mass education, this country sucks.
The Japanese have an expression: “Pass with four, fail with five.” That refers to the number of hours sleep per night. The kids in question are equivalent to our EIGHTH graders. Granted, a lot of those kids get shuffled off to trade schools, while the ones who go to “high school” are on a college prep path, and not the “Womyn’s Navel Gazing Studies” degree either.
There’s also a very good reason why 75 percent of the PhD’s in math, sciences, and engineering in this country are awarded to foreign nationals. Nothing discourages me like seeing my 5th grader coming home with homework I did in 3rd grade, and the expectations go downhill from there.
Well, considering that both India and China are pushing through the local equivalents of the industrial revolution, and they actually, you know, try to build stuff, they need gobs and gobs of engineers.
What would we even do with 230,000 new engineers every year in a country where you need five different permits to put a freakin wooden deck on your house and it takes a generation to get a nuclear power plant through the approval process?
Chief–beats the living dogshit out of 230,000 new Starbucks baristas who are otherwise unemployable.
I would take the dumbest American engineer over an average Chinese one any day. If we are comparing American system to Chinese education to American system. It’s not even apples to oranges comparison more like apples to day old chewing gum. A Chinese engineer is more on par with an American mechanic. Now Indians on the other hand they are some smart motherfuckers and there are lots of them. In the next 50 years that will be the only reason english will still be the dominant language on earth.
The problem with going along with this is that India has a HUGE population, to quote the CIA World Fact book, India has close to 1.2 BILLION people. We have a measly 300 million. the math on that is staggering, while its not great, it doesn’t mean we are in the dark ages with our engineers. also The fact is that How do you know that these “engineers” in India have legit Credentials? Did they go to school or did they buy in Mumbai?
Don’t get me wrong, We are a long way away from the reading writing and arithmetic as a standard when I went to school which wasn’t that long ago.
Just like Stress cards, we have fallen off course but not to the point that we can not get back on.
Those Nobel prizes really don’t mean SFA, frankly. What these numbers indicate to me is that our country offers concrete programs of a caliber high enough to be in demand worldwide, but American students don’t give a damn about these types of fields.
I’d also be interested in knowing how many of those degrees earned by foreign students were done so utilizing scholarships, etc.
Jason–careful, I’ve seen some pretty fucking dumb engineers.
Because of the leftist National Education Association and its multicultural approach to curriculum, our graduates are a bunch of sociologists and the like. They can’t find jobs in their fields because of saturation. And they end up in Zucotti park screaming for student loan forgiveness.
On the bright side, there’s this:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/2011_1128teens_engineer_future_success_at_techboston/srvc=home&position=0
I’ve been kicked out of too many classes to not take this at least a bit seriously. It’s not just the ‘oh we can’t hurt the precious child’s fragile ego’. We have problems with teachers as well. Far too many of them don’t know what they’re doing. I’ve had history teachers arguing that black powder wasn’t used in the middle ages and jets weren’t in WW2, those standing out in my memory because my tests mysteriously disappeared when I called the teacher on both of those. Math teachers that got mad if you asked them to demonstrate problems that weren’t in the book’s sample areas. Spanish teachers that barely spoke the language and couldn’t handle dialects outside of the Mexican one and so on. If we want to fix this, we’ll have to do more than drop the self-esteem bullshit.
You guys! Had to laugh because some of us were educated so far back that they were still teaching Latin in public schools!
The deterioration in the education industry is waaaay beyond alarming. If you youngsters are seeing in a decade or two since you were in the system, you can only imagine the horror with which we old timers view it!
#13/OWB: I may qualify as an oldtimer, then, because Latin was still taught (as an elective) in my high school. While I look upon today’s education programs with the same horror others are describing, I have to admit I looked upon my own HS education with horror when I went to college. That’s my point – there is no doubt in my mind things are messed up today, but in addition to – or in spite of – current education failures, SOMETHING else is involved that leads to creativity, development, inspiration, innovation.
Educators (they aren’t teachers anymore) can’t be fired past their probation period. Many see their role as day-care until little Johnny and Suzy can be promoted to someone else’s problem. Educators use the group-think system in order to maintain order in class, even when the answer to 2+2 comes back as 22.
Parents are busy working, watching Oprah, and are extremely happy to give up their parental rights and responsibilities to Educators.
Kids shoot the gap. Always.
Education has 4 partners: Parent is primary, with Admin, Educator, and Student. If Admin and Educator buck the parent, pull the Student out.
DaveO, you are absolutely correct, but there’s a problem with being able to pull your child out of the public school system. We’re in a fairly large metro area (St Louis), but our choices of education is either the public school system, or some sort of religious based private school.
There are so few alternatives or means with which to challenge my child. In fact, the only way we’re going to get the most out of her education is to consider sending her to the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy near Chicago. I think its sad that we even have to consider this because we have no other alternatives to run of the mill science and math classes at home.
I remember being in the TAG (Talented and Gifted) program from 3rd grade on. Today, programs like that were the first to be cut when budget crises hit.
The world needs garbage men too. Just sayin’.
@17 we do, but when everyone is a garbage man there is nobody left to run the cool garbage crushing machine.
It doesn’t help that a college education costs more than what the average American family makes in a year. For profit colleges are murdering affordable education, and to top it off the government slashes public education funding, then asks for better results. Bush’s no child left behind was pretty stupid idea, when he implemented here in Texas, and when he forced it on the nation while he was in office. Teachers are teaching to standardized tests which are a joke. When I graduated high school my class was the first to take the supposedly new and harder test, the first question in the history portion was “Who was President during the Civil War?” Are you fucking kidding me?
Our education system, much like a lot of systems we have in place right now, is in shambles.
So our country is bad at things like math, science and engineering because of a leftist conspiracy involving self esteem, and not a right wing ideology that holds the entire universe was poofed into existence 6,000 years ago through magic…
Right. Our kids aren’t studying reality because they have low self esteem. It has nothing to do with people teaching superstition and magic as science.
CRaissi #19: er, um, HUH?
This religious idiocy probably has more to do with Americans doing poorly in math, science, and engineering than a left wing conspiracy to lower Americans’ self esteem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selman_v._Cobb_County_School_District
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328366/John-Shimkus-Global-warming-wont-destroy-planet-God-promised-Noah.html
The left does have their anti-science loons, like Bill Maher and Oprah, but I don’t really see them trying to push that magic nonsense into our schools. Then again, they did get Steve Jobs killed. Also, the joint Oprah and Jenny McCarthy body count is pretty high.
Here’s the punchline, with the removal of private funding for college loans, and this asinine idea that “everyone should go to college” bullshit, a run of the mill (no pun intended) bachelor’s degree has become the functional equivalent of what a high-school diploma was 30 years ago. You want to weep for something, weep for those who used to pursue trades or other service related professions. What is the result of decades of telling people they deserve a college education? Roll up at your local park and see who’s camping out there lately…a bunch of self-absorbed, entitlement minded jagoffs who want yet another “participation” trophy for just showing up. I see this shit all the time in my line of work, where I’m forced to interview candidates for software development jobs. The last three new hires I brought on board were green-card visa workers from India…why? Because they didn’t roll into my office acting like Johnny Douchebag thinking they were going to work 30 hours a week and want the corner office in 3 months. Was I impressed with their education? Not so much, since they couldn’t even get past the technical interview…the Indian guys? Don’t care that their master’s degree was earned on a street corner in East Bumfuk, they knew the right answers and they continue to out perform nearly every other developer I have on staff. So when I say “the world needs garbage men too”, I say it with the knowledge that while I’d LOVE to hire some serious minded kid fresh out of school looking to make a name for himself, I’m faced with fact that the only name I can muster for the epic failures I’ve seen so far is “oxygen thief”.
Had to laugh because some of us were educated so far back that they were still teaching Latin in public schools!
And Greek. And not that long ago in my case (less than 30 years.)
FCOD–Bush may have signed NCLB as president, but make no mistake, this program was one of Fat (now Dead) Ted Kennedy’s little pet projects that he bullshitted his way through to Bush’s desk. Throwing more money at the problem isn’t the solution.
We as a nation had engineers who hand-drew prints and calculated on slide rules, yet still managed to take the SR-71 from drawing board to first flight in just over two years.
Try doing that with what comes out of our schools today. But they can play the shit out of Skyrim and MW3.
Goddamnit…I still have to fight the Stress card battle. They don’t exist and never have. I think there might be a picture of bigfoot with one somewhere, but that is it…ahh Stress cards are like a horrible zombie that won’t die.
China produces numbers that is it pure an simple. They can turn out shit tons of crappy engineers, but that is it. They turn out tons of shitty engineers, but I would still put any one of our engineers up against their engineers. How long until they have to cover up the disaster of the 3 gorges dam project?
Actually I would say it largely is a Leftist conspiracy.
Maybe even a communist one. After all infiltrating the American education system and modifying it to churn out useless idiots would make more sense and be more feasible than a straight up invasion of the United States.
JPJ: that’s because I’ve seen a stress card at Sill.
#21 You decry religious influence, yet seem oddly ignorant of the global warming cult pushing its way into every classroom.
The Jesuits beat Latin into me. It even took some summer school to finish the job. We had Greek too, but I wasn’t going anywhere near that.
I followed the links so you don’t have to.
Citations in #21 purporting to support this statement “people teaching superstition and magic as science” amounts to:
1) a 2006 lawsuit where some religious groups wanted a school to include a sticker in a new science text saying “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” — they lost
and
2) a Republican congressman who wanted to chair the Energy Committee saying stuff in 2010 — he lost.
QMC, and he cites Wiki as a credible source. Public education has given us gems like this asshat in a Wal-Mart in OKC, exhorting the workers and shoppers to go home. http://youtu.be/5CA9cQkWyqs
In my sophomore year, I went from a large, urban public school, to a rural, small public school. The first thing I found out, I was 4 chapters behind in the Latin book we were using, same book, but the small school was way ahead of the school I came from. Same in English, same in algebra.
The small school was intent on making their students learn, and perform. The big school? A warehouse.
FCOD:
You decry for-profit schools, but you don’t address public universities. Most schools offering education above high school are making multiple millions.
NCLB was a joint project of Teddy Kennedy and George W. Bush: teach the test and use the test to hold educators accountable. Most folks, especially educators, have never been able to answer the question ‘why teach something you will never test?’ The other question being how to hold educators accountable. So the true problems with NCLB come from dumbing children down so they can pass an easy test so educators can’t be held accountable (because then they can’t pay their union dues).
I don’t the the poor quality of education is limited to only here. How many engineering disasters have befallen China in the last few years? Now, how many are actually getting reported by the ChiComs? High speed rail failures, the new multi-billion airport that collapsed or had a cave-in, etc.
I’m not disagreeing with the assessment that our education system is sliding, fast. I just think everyone else is lying about theirs, too.
NHSparky – So do you think our problem is the drive of the kids or the education being provided to them? I agree more money thrown at the problem won’t accomplish anything besides shitting it up some more. Double points for skyrim reference.
@31 DaveO – Hell yeah I decry for profit education institutions, they push prices go up so the profit margin can be higher. Public institutions follow suit, and they have to, to keep up. College is quickly becoming not worth it unless you go for a professional degree or are just getting your undergrad on the way to grad school. This link has a nice little break down of recent costs, debts and salaries. http://visual.ly/your-bachelors-degree-worth-it
I have quickly found my History degree isn’t worth much professionally without more schooling, so that’s why I have backup plans for career work.
Not everyone should need or have a college degree, it’s just not feasible in reality, but people shouldn’t have to be put in debt for 10-20+ years to get one either. We are the most bad ass nation on Earth right now. We can do pretty much whatever we want, if we ever get around to it, and I think educating our people should be a high priority.
Dave O I want see a picture of a private holding one up to a drill SGT and the drill giving the private time to get his stress taken care of. I want the documentation that goes along with the use of the stress card and how it is to be utilized. I also would like a picture of a yeti and the alien…
I have seen an actual bullshit card someone carried it around it had “bullshit” written in big letters on it. They would pull it out whenever they felt it necessary. Doesn’t mean it is official.
Most people are focusing on the state of STEM education in public schools, but there’s another confounding factor: the H1B visa. Companies, particularly tech and pharmaceutical companies, love these because it allows them to hire foreign workers with Ph.D.s and pay them comparatively little. The ideal H1B visa worker is someone from, say, India with a Ph.D. who is unmarried and thrilled to work for $35,000 a year doing biochemistry/drug discovery work because it’s a better situation than they could find in their home country. When companies say “We can’t find any qualified Americans for these jobs!” what they really mean is “We can’t hire big brainpower for as cheaply as we want!”
To add insult to injury, the stamp bwanas and bean counters with MBAs are paid much better than the people who do the actual science, and their attitude seems to be, “I don’t understand what you scientists do, so it must be easy.” If you (the generic you, not any of you personally) want kids to think science is a viable career, their investment in their own education has to be paid off with something better than technician wages.
Now, full disclosure: this topic is important to me because I am finishing my Ph.D. in chemistry. I worked in science for a few years, then went back to school to get my doctorate because I could see what was coming. Companies want first-class brainpower for coach-class wages. It can take between eight and thirteen years from the time one begins college to earn a doctorate. All of those years of schooling have an opportunity cost: they are years where a person could be establishing a career and making money. Wages for STEM professionals have to be high enough to overcome that opportunity cost of getting the education, and until that happens technology and the physical sciences will not be attractive for most students.