The Future of American Students
The Future of American Academics
I know it's been a while since I've written one of these, been really busy at work lately.
Even though I was planning on writing about 9/11, I decided to go the less cliche route and write about something else: Education and the future of the American child. I saw a story on the news today and it struck me because it's something that's been happening for a while. We're quickly falling behind the rest of the world in mathematics and it's going to really hurt us as the world moves more towards global technology. The average 4th grader in the US places just behind the Asian nations and the European socialists, but ahead of the Russian republics. However, once that child is in 8th grade, they have fallen behind Russian, Latvian and even Slovakian students. I've been to Slovakia (it's a dump), and if they're able to have better math classes than us, there's something seriously wrong with the system. The problem is systematic throughout the US and it's getting worse every day. The danger is that we'll continue to lose ground to the vast populations of India and China and that they'll take over the international techonology markets. After all, if they're better at math, harder working and have 3 times the population, then they shouldn't have any problem beating us to any new technology.
Technology is not about today, it's about tomorrow. Whatever is in public use has gone obsolete already in the labs, and the more we fall behind in math and science, the more it will affect our ability to keep up with technology. It's not a coincedence that Japan and South Korea have exploded economically as they've become technology meccas. But now the danger is not in losing ground to those already prosperous technology hubs, but to the emerging ones in India, China, even Eastern Europe. People think that Americans are so much richer than everyone else and that our lead on the rest of the world is insurmountable, but that's simply false.
So as we're further abandoning the principals of math and science and focusing more on entertaining the kids, we're pretty much digging our own grave. Sure Intel has thousands of employees in Silicon Valley who are highly intelligent and experienced, but so does Mumbai, and their cost of labor is far cheaper. We've seen many industries that were the backbone of this nation sent away as we've moved onto newer and better things, but what happens when the next innovation comes from Mumbai and not San Jose?
Notice how the campuses at any school that has admissions based solely on numbers are much more Asian/International than ever before? California is not 50% asian, but you'd think that if you went to ANY decent UC campus. Why is that? Because their culture puts more stock into hard work, dedication and fundamentals. While our public schools are teaching kids that math isn't about the answer and all about the process, the kids completely miss their chance to develop computational skills. They do projects now instead of assignments. Busy work is useless, but what about actually challenging kids? If a kid cannot get the concept of 2x3=6 by 2nd grade, they surely shouldn't be allowed to move on, right? It's the same for English, hell, I have coworkers who shouldn't have been allowed to graduate the 8th grade because they still write things like "Your right" when they really mean "You're right"...it's a totally different sentence!!!!!
So what would I do to fix this problem? Well, first of all, I think that one of the main reasons why I am so good at math is that I was being secretly taught how to convery pretty complex fractions into decimals by going to baseball games and being quizzed on batting averages and ERAs. By the time I was 8 I could calculate pretty much anyone's batting average to within .005. I think that the dropoff of baseball from the national obsession has caused a lot of these problems. Baseball is a game of statistics and numbers and it has always been a game that intellectuals love to follow. But this country has forgotten its roots and moved onto Nascar and the NFL. Nascar serves no purpose, you learn nothing from watching a race on TV other than which detergent to buy or what kind of coffee to drink. Football has a lot of strategy, but it's more about watching guys hit each other and seeing freakish athletes run and dance. The stats mean very little, and that means that most of the people watching are spending 3 (usually 9 hours on Sundays for those typical beer-gutted American men) hours sitting on their ass watching others exercise while they gorge on beer and pretzels. Nobody sits there and tries to calculate how many passes Alex Smith needs to complete to bring his % up to 60 on the season, they just watch the game and use it as an excuse to drink at 10 in the morning. The main stat in football that is comparable from year to year is the QB rating stat, and fitting for this argument, it has to be done by computer because it's such a complicated stat. Baseball is a pure game that has numbers that matter in every game and it makes for a more mentally active viewing. So my proposal to improve our math is not to make schools better, that's a necessity anyways, but to bring baseball back to its place as the #1 and only sport that matters in America. Because I don't want to live in a world where little leaguers can't figure out their own batting averages, and we're moving in that direction very quickly.
I know it's been a while since I've written one of these, been really busy at work lately.
Even though I was planning on writing about 9/11, I decided to go the less cliche route and write about something else: Education and the future of the American child. I saw a story on the news today and it struck me because it's something that's been happening for a while. We're quickly falling behind the rest of the world in mathematics and it's going to really hurt us as the world moves more towards global technology. The average 4th grader in the US places just behind the Asian nations and the European socialists, but ahead of the Russian republics. However, once that child is in 8th grade, they have fallen behind Russian, Latvian and even Slovakian students. I've been to Slovakia (it's a dump), and if they're able to have better math classes than us, there's something seriously wrong with the system. The problem is systematic throughout the US and it's getting worse every day. The danger is that we'll continue to lose ground to the vast populations of India and China and that they'll take over the international techonology markets. After all, if they're better at math, harder working and have 3 times the population, then they shouldn't have any problem beating us to any new technology.
Technology is not about today, it's about tomorrow. Whatever is in public use has gone obsolete already in the labs, and the more we fall behind in math and science, the more it will affect our ability to keep up with technology. It's not a coincedence that Japan and South Korea have exploded economically as they've become technology meccas. But now the danger is not in losing ground to those already prosperous technology hubs, but to the emerging ones in India, China, even Eastern Europe. People think that Americans are so much richer than everyone else and that our lead on the rest of the world is insurmountable, but that's simply false.
So as we're further abandoning the principals of math and science and focusing more on entertaining the kids, we're pretty much digging our own grave. Sure Intel has thousands of employees in Silicon Valley who are highly intelligent and experienced, but so does Mumbai, and their cost of labor is far cheaper. We've seen many industries that were the backbone of this nation sent away as we've moved onto newer and better things, but what happens when the next innovation comes from Mumbai and not San Jose?
Notice how the campuses at any school that has admissions based solely on numbers are much more Asian/International than ever before? California is not 50% asian, but you'd think that if you went to ANY decent UC campus. Why is that? Because their culture puts more stock into hard work, dedication and fundamentals. While our public schools are teaching kids that math isn't about the answer and all about the process, the kids completely miss their chance to develop computational skills. They do projects now instead of assignments. Busy work is useless, but what about actually challenging kids? If a kid cannot get the concept of 2x3=6 by 2nd grade, they surely shouldn't be allowed to move on, right? It's the same for English, hell, I have coworkers who shouldn't have been allowed to graduate the 8th grade because they still write things like "Your right" when they really mean "You're right"...it's a totally different sentence!!!!!
So what would I do to fix this problem? Well, first of all, I think that one of the main reasons why I am so good at math is that I was being secretly taught how to convery pretty complex fractions into decimals by going to baseball games and being quizzed on batting averages and ERAs. By the time I was 8 I could calculate pretty much anyone's batting average to within .005. I think that the dropoff of baseball from the national obsession has caused a lot of these problems. Baseball is a game of statistics and numbers and it has always been a game that intellectuals love to follow. But this country has forgotten its roots and moved onto Nascar and the NFL. Nascar serves no purpose, you learn nothing from watching a race on TV other than which detergent to buy or what kind of coffee to drink. Football has a lot of strategy, but it's more about watching guys hit each other and seeing freakish athletes run and dance. The stats mean very little, and that means that most of the people watching are spending 3 (usually 9 hours on Sundays for those typical beer-gutted American men) hours sitting on their ass watching others exercise while they gorge on beer and pretzels. Nobody sits there and tries to calculate how many passes Alex Smith needs to complete to bring his % up to 60 on the season, they just watch the game and use it as an excuse to drink at 10 in the morning. The main stat in football that is comparable from year to year is the QB rating stat, and fitting for this argument, it has to be done by computer because it's such a complicated stat. Baseball is a pure game that has numbers that matter in every game and it makes for a more mentally active viewing. So my proposal to improve our math is not to make schools better, that's a necessity anyways, but to bring baseball back to its place as the #1 and only sport that matters in America. Because I don't want to live in a world where little leaguers can't figure out their own batting averages, and we're moving in that direction very quickly.
posted by Dan Pasternack at 7:15 PM
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