Friday, May 6, 2005

U.S. losing its lead, "Very Dangerous" -- Bill Gates: In a recent appearance, Bill Gates said [...]In the same program, Shirly Tilghman, president of Princeton University said, We have a really failing K-12 education system . . . too often, by the time [teenagers] get to us, they are math-phobic, they're science-phobic, despite the fact that I'm fully convinced many of them have the talents to become great scientists. And the consequence of this is we have been increasingly dependent upon attracting students from outside the United States to American universities, where they come, and they excel. (Via isen.blog.) The scariest part is that Dr. Tilghman is talking about students who go to Princeton, who by and large went to the best K-12 schools in the country. I see the same problem at Penn. Many smart kids who avoid subjects and majors that require mathematical or formal thinking (like computer science), some because of fear, others because they feel those subjects are too hard and they won't get as good a GPA as their friends who take other subjects. The sense that those subjects are hard because they deal with the most interesting questions is not common among them. Probably because all sense of curiosity and wonder about the natural world has been stolen from them by dull, pedestrian, often incompetent science education. At schools that parents pay big bucks for in tuition or property taxes. If this is the case for mostly privileged Princeton and Penn undergraduates, what is it for the rest of the kids? This is a rhetorical question, I know the answer, unfortunately. 6:57:55 PM