Some good points. But we also need to give teachers some credit. If you want to teach 8th grade math or science half the job will be dealing with the “problem” students – the child who’s totally unsupervised at home & used to doing as they please, whenever they please, the child who’s being bullied, the child who’s doing the bullying, the chronically disruptive child, the withdrawn child who may be pregnant…just teaching won’t be enough. You’ll have to be a surrogate parent and social worker as well, and for that – there are no test scores.

A big component of the USA’s dismal knowledge of and inappropriate self-confidence regarding science and engineering is HOLLYWOOD [aka Burbank and Culver City].
Or, if you want it a bit narrower, commercial TELEVISION.
Even a show that at least tries to have in its premise logical investigation, like “House,” always has to have the mystical, feel good, fuzzy folks WINNING, and House’s crumudgeonly but scientific (including the leaps of ideas) approach seen as, okay, problem-solving, but to no good end as it screws him up.
There are no scientists and engineerings producing or directing in Hollywood (I hope someone corrects me!). There are probably some folks writing, but these things never get on the screen, big or little, in the original form.

Well, I’m sure this is not an original rant and I have some work to do, but felt like weighing in. A similar rant re elected officials, especially in Congress, would also be appropriate!…

최근 Cosmic Variance에 과학 교육에 관한 포스팅이 올라왔다. 미국의 경우, ‘자신감만으로 충분하지 ì•Šê³  실질적인 교사 교육이나 적절한 자료 공급, 수업에서의 학생 도전 유도 딱이 필요하다’…

There seems to be a disconnect between American kids doing poorly in math + science, and the fact that America is relatively advanced technologically.

If Americans were genuinely “stupid” and/or “lazy”, then I would expect the society to resemble something like “Mad Max” and not a technologically advanced society.

*******************************************************

JC,

Some of the contributing factors to this maybe the larger population of the USA – which compensates to some degree the percentage distribution of skills – and the contributions to the tech workforce from immigrants. Plus the post-WWII boom may have given the USA head start in establishing labs, etc.

As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that the American work force is insufficiently educated in mathematics.

I think that the average grown-up (in the US or anywhere else in the world), is not educated in mathematics at all. Just ask a random person on the street why -1 times -1 equals 1.

In school what they teach you year after year after year is arithmetic and some rules that you can use to manipulate equations, drawing graphs and drawing triangles etc. It’s like kindergarten for grown ups, an insult to our intellect.

The reason why you need people to drive trucks is similar to the reason why the Amish need people to drive their horse-drawn carts and why the indiginous people in the Amazon need people to make bows and arrows.

http://www.internationaled.org/mathsciencereport.pdf

Not trying to be clever here, that’s just the right way of looking at it. The amusing thing to me was not the disparity in scores, but the (inverse) correlation with satisfaction. Which is also not demonstrably significant, but nevertheless amusing.

“Amateur astronomers of North America: Wake up! The rest of the world is passing you by. ..

I maintain that, as a whole, modern-day amateur astronomers in the United States and Canada perform dismally compare to those in several other parts of the world. ..

Amateur computers, notably also in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, West Germany, and Japan, predicted mutual phenomena of Jupiter’s satellites, occultations of stars by planets, and positions of asteroids and comets. ..

And whenever some computation is required in order to reduce an observatio to usable form, the U.S. amateur usually fails to produce. ..

Yet if amateurs want to be taken seriously by professionals they must perform to professional standards These standards involve not just the act of observing, but a moderately quantitative understanding of what an observation means and how to make it connect to other information that may be available. Such work requires more scientifica literacy than many North American amateurs seems to possess.

I constantly receive discovery messages form professional and amateur astronomers around the world. It is usually the U.S. amateur who inissts that the anomalous speck on the single photograph he took last weekend refers to some new celestial object. On the other hand, there are, at least in Japan and Italy, amateurs whoo do find minor planets, determine that they are new, make appropriate astrometric observations, calculate orbits, and thus get to name their discoveries.

Amateurs in Australia, Frnace, England, West Germany, Italy, and especially Japan are making excellent contributions in this area.

The above is a real-life “experiment” from a Harvard astronomer, who samples the population of amateur submissions from all over the world. American amateurs (“as a whole”) sound like morons.

He is saying what a scientist friend of mine (also an amateur astronomer, UofArizona grad) says:

“The distribution curve of American amateurs is skewed over to the DOLT”
“We’re in the Dark Ages”

The last statement was also told to me by an adjunct astronomer (UofArizona, Steward Observatory), when we talked at the 2001 AAS meeting. I.e., the science-ignorance in USA is SO BAD due to poor education system, it’s like the Dark Ages. Just like what Carl Sagan said “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”. Pseudo-science is so prevalent, it’s fairly common to run into crackpots (like on airplanes, see recent thread “Pseudoscience in the Sky”)

The above scientist friend related a story (from U of Arizona physicist):

“You know, he’s really discusted with freshman physics class at UofA. They have had to setup remedial physics courses to deal with it”

I heard the same thing from a Cal Sate Long Beach astronomy instructor, he was apalled at the quality (“as a whole”) of his students. A classmate of mine (MIT PhD, U of Indiana economics prof) said the same thing for his undergrad students, “poor mathematical skills”.

“I consider this an EMBARASSMENT”
“I’m EMBARASSED to be an American”

The underlying problem is that everyone wants their child to be a scientist, a doctor or a lawyer. So our educational system is designed to turn out 100% of these type of adults. Of course the jobs are not available; someone has to stock the supermarket shelves; someone has to drive the big trucks, etc.

A very high percentage of the public has sufficiently high math sckills to do their job. What more could one demand of the population? More mathematics than is needed, is clearly of less utility than more understanding of history, psychology, medicine and all that knowledge of the human species that could be taught instead of mathematics.