I ran across two stories about how the American education system’s lax approach to math and science will cause the country to lose economic leadership role along with its innovative and resulting competitive advantages. This discussion has been going on for years, and whereas the article from Inside Higher Ed is somewhat predictable, the other, from the American Council of Education, was a bit of a shocker.
The first article, Scientific Remedies, describes how the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project hosted a forum to suggest ways government policy could help slow the nation’s slide toward scientific mediocrity. Some ideas included grand-challengelike competitions with prize money and funding more graduate research positions.
Even while I was reading the article, I thought those solutions were somewhat superficial, but then I read the comments (below the article), mostly from researchers. Here’s a typical one:
If there is a problem with science in the United States, it is the persistent and utterly groundless belief by the media in that country that there is a quick fix to that and most any other problem. Turning around research and development in science and technology will involve actually funding research and development in science and technology. The quick fix of ‘prizes’ may create newspaper headlines but show no evidence of fostering sustained progress.
According to a recent survey by the American Council on Education, the American public blames the country’s decreasing competitiveness on cheap labor. From the press release:
Eighty-five percent of Americans view cheap labor rather than the development of a more skilled workforce overseas as the most significant threat to United States competitiveness....
While policy-makers and opinion leaders in the United States recently have paid significant attention to maintaining America’s competitive advantage in the global economy and have proposed meeting the challenges by focusing on enhancing human capital in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics fields, the public has a different view of the challenge and the potential solutions.
Less than one-third of the public (31 percent) believe that math and science classes offered to students not majoring in those fields are “very relevant†to life after graduation. In addition, only a slight majority of the public (54 percent) believe that all students should have to take more math and science courses.
This sounds dangerously irresponsible, doesn’t it? It may also explain why lawmakers don’t push harder for more resources for science and technology education.
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