I earned my BS and MS in a STEM major at one of the Schools shown in the graph in this article.
I am probably the worst student to ever graduate from my Alma Mater with a STEM degree. I was accepted because I developed a passion for computers, would do anything to get enrolled, worked hard, would not accept no for an answer and it helped that few people wanted to enroll. This problem in STEM recruiting has existed for decades.
I'm not an education “theory” expert but my wife, who has an Engineering Degree and was one of the hardest working and smartest woman I ever met spent the last 15 years as a teacher in a private school. She stayed at home with our children until our youngest entered school in the first grade.
She worked as an Engineer in the private sector for nearly 15 years; I was an IT worker for 33 years.
We agreed when we were married that who ever earned the least amount of money and had the lowest Net Present Value in their future career at the time we had children would stay at home with the kids until they entered school. I guess I studied harder than I thought. (LOL)
Both my wife and I took a lot of advanced classes. We pulled all our children from a quote “Good” Public school system after 2 years and enrolled them in a private school because we were shocked at the poor quality of the teachers, curriculum, administration and policies of one of the better school districts in our State.
To obtain tuition discounts, my wife became a teachers assistant and after a few years she became a certified teacher by taking graduate classes at night. She has been an assistant teacher or a full time STEM teacher for more than 20 years now.
We've discussed the problem in education for many years always with the goal of giving our kids the best we could. The problem has several complex dimensions that need to be addressed. I will discuss only one of the multiple dimensions here. I will discuss the level and depth of education in the foundation and fundamentals of mathematics! Even in a private school, with students who have all the advantages that one could ask for, more than half the students fail to grasp the most basic mathematical concepts.
Half the students struggle with simple fractions in the 7th or 8th grade even though they have been promoted into algebra or even higher level classes. Those concepts must be mastered to go any further. A STEM education that uses advanced math is impossible without a solid foundation in the fundamentals of mathematics.
By the time children reach High School many are lost. They struggle through the classes but they are given passing grades and passed along. Their education is very broad on many subjects but only inches deep.
The fundamentals are poorly taught and poorly understood by many of the elementary school teachers themselves. By the time kids reach middle school, they are already behind. This is true even for some of the students whose parents are quote “professionals”.
Many Parents refuse to believe that their child is anything less that an Albert Einstein and blame the “system” for their child's failures. Many parents are incapable of helping their child by the time they reach the 7th grade.
Most parents tell the schools and their children that quote, “I never needed math in the real world” and they demand that their child be passed along.
Childhood Development experts will disagree with me but I am convinced that students who are not drilled in the memorization of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables and children who don't spend a great deal of time reading by the time they reach High School will be hopelessly lost in the “New Economy”.
Instead of the fundamentals, children are given in the State Mandated curriculum at best a very broad and meaningless set of survey courses, with little depth and at worst they are given “State” driven propaganda designed to scare the crap out of kids into the “correct” political ideology. i.e. The world will end in 12 years if we don't ..... (Vote Democrat)
Even my Church has given up on an Apocalyptic world view as an incentive to believe. It's counter productive when the apocalypse repeatedly fails to materialize.
I've noticed several posts about the availability of calculators and computer based “algebraic” and “mathematical” software that are capable of solving most of the “mundane” mathematical tasks. I'm a firm believer that if you can't do the mundane by hand you don't understand what you're doing. There is a big differences between minimally understanding the mechanical processes of a concept and understanding the fundamental building blocks of a concept and being able to derive by yourself the fundamentals to arrive at the mechanical process by yourself.
Memorizing the basic fundamental formulas of Calculus from a text book is not the same as learning how to derive the formulas from scratch. The difference is as simple as knowing the difference between the “What” versus the “Why” of a phenomena. Without a knowledge of the “Why” you can't advance, you can only remain in place. If you can't derive what has been you can't derive what will be.
Don't get me wrong, there are excellent students coming out of our schools but they are kids who would have done well if you just left them in a library by themselves with a little bit of attention and direction.
Our failure has been to not expect our children to live up to their potential and to be content with them achieving the average. We are teaching to the least common denominator instead of teaching to the greatest common multiple.
Caveat: I spent more than 30 years in IT. I learned the full syntax and grammar of innumerable programming languages, multiple operating systems, multiple design methodologies, software frameworks, user interface API's and integrated development environments over the course of time. Without the theoretical underpinnings of my chosen discipline my career would have been significantly shorter and the list of "tools" I learned to use even shorter!
My knowledge of the syntax and grammar of multiple programming languages is significantly greater than my grasp of English grammar rules and especially punctuation.
Be kind. I believe my intent is understandable in spite of my spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes.
One can sense the frustration tempered by sadness in what you write. I have seen what you describe from the perspective of a student in America, as a father of children in America and as a father of four children who have gone through
gymnasium here in Germany.
The German experience from kindergarten right through graduation and on to law school and university for computer science has taught me the superiority of the German system-but even that system, formerly thoroughly merit-based, has now at least partly given way to the pressures toward egalitarianism. As you probably know the Germans triage their students early on and put them on a life path to one of three school systems. The Abitur awarded by the German Gymnasium is a ticket into free university education without competitive entrance exam except for medicine and veterinary science.
This describes one of the main reasons why I stay in Germany, the schools here on average, at least at the Gymnasium level, are superior to most public schools in America and many private schools and they are free.
Under this system my third son at the age of 17 went directly into law school after Gymnasium while my oldest son here in Germany elected to go to the University of Virginia and then on to law school which cost him an extra four years. So the question is, do we want lawyers to be Renaissance men or do we want them to be proficient at the law?
However, I have seen the standards even in the highly ranked Bavarian schools begin to be watered down over three decades under the pressure of egalitarianism. As you point out, every parent assumes his child is Einstein and every parent, even when he or she admits in the dark corners of his mind that the child is average, understands that the child would benefit immeasurably from the sheepskin which is the ticket onto the better life.
So the main pressure by the parents is to undo a merit-based system and substitute a "compassionate" system. At the university level we see the same impulse from the faculty and we see the impulse toward compassion in the affirmative action programs. As the standards in the universities are watered down so that everybody can enjoy an equal outcome, the universities attempt to compensate by enrolling merit-based Asians.
The parents are happy so long as the kid gets the ticket to the better life and remain blithely unconcerned that the system is eroding beneath their feet.
All of this comes about in a society that thinks it is living in an era of abundance and closes its eyes to the fact that we actually live in an era of scarcity. In other words, we as a nation cannot afford our national programs or our personal lifestyles unless we go into debt by about $1 trillion a year together with an extra amount labeled unpaid liabilities. This is an illusion, a bubble which deludes us into thinking that we can afford to abandon merit and substitute compassion.
Certainly we as parents think we can abandon merit where our own children are concerned. Educators, routinely leftists, think they can abandon merit for egalitarianism on ideological grounds. We do this on so many levels, we see crony capitalism, we see self-dealing politicians, and we see whole sections of society addicted to subsidies. All of this is tolerated because we believe we live in an era of abundance. We do not.
Teachers think that the fault lies with the parents who are unresponsive to their children's needs to be educated at home as well as in school. Taxpayers believe the teachers are greedy for ever demanding more and more money while producing less and less. Parents think the system is corruptible and insist that their children not be left out of the corruption. Teachers say we are here to teach but we cannot fix the cancer in our culture which produces broken homes and lost generations of children and it is, therefore, unfair to expect us to do so. Politicians are eager to make venal deals with teachers unions and sellout the kids. Everyone except a few curmudgeonly conservatives believe that throwing money at the problem will solve it.
We cannot cure any of this as long as we assume we are living in abundance believing we have a cushion which permits us to deny the reality that without a merit system mediocrity, indolence and corruption will bring the system down in time. We cannot cure any of this so long as we are paying penance for broken race relations over generations so that we cannot address the plight of the inner-city child. We cannot address these problems unless we are willing to courageously examine IQ levels among races. Ultimately the problem is a cultural problem but we have no institution, not the educational establishment, not our churches, not our political parties and certainly not our government which is capable of fixing the culture.
So we go along, taking care of our own kids if we can, and pretending we live in abundance.
