| Topic: |
Sociology > Education |
| User: |
"Bob LeChevalier" |
| Date: |
29 Jul 2003 07:01:25 AM |
| Object: |
Re: Johnny Can't Add But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can |
(Dr. Jai Maharaj) wrote:
Johnny Can't Add
But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can
By Fred Reed
Sunday, July 27, 2003
None of this is original with me. In 1999, the National
Academy of Sciences released a study noting that over
half of U.S. engineering doctorates are awarded to
foreign students. Where are Smith and Jones?
At the bar having a cool one.
Why are members of these very small groups doing so much
of the important research for the United States? That's
easy. They're smart, they go into the sciences, and they
work hard. Potatoes are more mysterious. It's not
affirmative action. They produce. The qualifications of
these students can easily be checked. They have them. The
question is not whether these groups perform, or why, but
why the rest of us no longer do. What has happened?
Simple - there are no rewards for that kind of performance. We reward
hard work by ... more hard work. Successful scientists and engineers
are blessed with 60 hour weeks and "no life".
It is not an easy question,
Of course it is.
but a lot of it, I think, is
the deliberate enstupidation of American education.
But it can't be, for reasons that will become evident.
Again, the idea is not original with me. Said the
American Educational Research Association of the NAS
report, "Serious deficiencies in American pre-college
education,
No.
along with wavering support for basic research,
Yes.
were cited by the panel as major contributors to this problem."
Consider mathematics. In the mid-Sixties I took freshman
chemistry at Hampden-Sydney College, a solid school in
Virginia but not nearly MIT. It was assumed-assumed
without thought-that students knew algebra cold. They had
to. You can't do heavy loads of highly mathematical
homework, or wrestle with ideas like integrating
probability densities over three-space, or do endless
gas-law and reaction-rate calculations, if you aren't
sure how exponents work.
Remedial mathematics at the college level was unheard of.
You just weren't aware of it. There was remedial college math in the
60s. Indeed, there were college students who had never taken Algebra,
though they were unlikely to be in a "solid school".
Remember that even if Algebra is required for high school graduation,
and for admission to college X, that requirement can be fulfilled by
having taken the class as a freshman and getting a "D-", then never
using any algebra again for the rest of high school. What are the
odds that such a kid 4 or more years later will know algebra?
Of course such kids wouldn't have any interest in "integrating
probability densities over three-space, or do endless gas-law and
reaction-rate calculations", and in fact they would not end up in the
classes that the author was taking.
The assumption was that people who weren't ready for
college work should be somewhere else.
Not necessarily. They could be at a lesser college, or they could be
in a non-technical major. Why does an English Lit major need to know
algebra?
No one thought
about it. Today, remedial classes in both reading and
math are common at universities. We seem to be dumbing
ourselves to death.
Missing from this is that many of the people taking these remedial
classes are people returning to school after years in the workforce.
I recently had children go through the high schools of
Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington. I watched them
come home with badly misspelled chemistry handouts from
half-educated teachers, watched them do stupid, make-work
science projects that taught them nothing about the
sciences but used lots of pretty paper.
And yet Arlington high schools produce some of the top students in the
country.
The extent of scholastic decline is sometimes
astonishing. So help me, I once saw, in a middle school
in Arlington, a student's project on a bulletin board
celebrating Enrico Fermi's contributions to "Nucler
Physicts" (Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee
champions: 2003, Sai Guntuyri; 2002, Pratyush Buddiga;
2001, Sean Conley; 2000, George Thampy; 1999, Nupur
Lala).
So some Americans can't spell, or rather, don't care whether they can
spell? A different and somewhat unrelated problem. I am sure that
some other student spelled the word correctly, but the teachers don't
put only the best students' work on the wall these days.
It appears that a few groups are keeping their standards
up and the rest of us are drowning our children in self-
indulgent social engineering, political correctness, and
feel-good substitutes for learning.
But if it were the education system, then the groups could not keep
their standards up. Those spelling bee champions, despite their
foreign sounding last names, were probably all American kids, born in
this country and most of them attending public schools. It is not
that the other students aren't being taught, but rather that they are
the horses led to water who cannot be made to drink. They'd rather
revel in the hormones of teenhood, rebelling against parents and
authority and "chillin' with their homies" when they aren't tying to
get inside the pants of the opposite gender.
And for the most part, American parents indulge their kids by allowing
this. But some groups' parents are less likely to, so their kids
excel in high school and lead the way in college.
So the problem is American values, not the American education system.
Some of our growing dependency is hidden. We do not
merely rely on small industrious groups in America and on
foreigners working here. Increasingly the United States
contracts out its technical thinking to Asia.
But it isn't dependency, it is economics. Asian labor is cheaper. US
corporations can hire several Indian or Thai workers in those
countries for the price of one worker in this country, and they don't
have to worry about American labor laws. It isn't necessarily that
the workers are better - they might be but they don't have to be - but
that usually two workers can do more work than one, no matter how good
the one worker is.
If you read technically aware publications like Wired
magazine (and how many people do?)
Not many. You can't make money or get laid by reading, and those are
the two primary American pastimes.
you find that major
American corporations have more and more of their
computer programming done by people in, for example,
India. In cities like Bombay, large colonies of Indians
work for U.S. companies by Internet. This again means
that counting names at American institutions
underestimates the growth of intellectual dependence.
That presumes that computer programming is a mark of intellectual
superiority.
This too we would be wise to ponder. Americans often
think of India chiefly as a land of ghastly poverty.
Well, yes. It is also a country with about three times
our population and a lot of very bright people who want
to get ahead. They're professionally hungry. We no longer
are.
That's a good summary.
People speak of globalization. This is it, and it's just
beginning. Where will it take us? How long can we
maintain a technologically dominant economy if we are, as
a country, no longer willing to do our own thinking? If
we rely heavily on less than 10 percent of our own
population while employing more and more foreigners
abroad?
The answer is simple: when competition starts to hurt American
workers, the American workers will act smarter. They don't need to
yet.
It's not them. It's us. I've heard the phrase, "the Asian
challenge to the West." I don't think so. When Sally Chen
gets a doctorate in biochemistry, she's not challenging
America. She's getting a doctorate in biochemistry. Those
who study have no reason to apologize to those who don't.
Why would anyone think that getting a doctorate is a reason to
apologize. Of course, if Sally Chen was born in this country, she is
an American and not an Asian - a problem that too many analysts who
engage in name-counting forget.
The Mathematical Association of America runs a contest
for the extremely bright and prepared among high-school
students. It is called the United States of America
Mathematics Olympiad, and it "provides a means of
identifying and encouraging the most creative secondary
mathematics students in the country."
An unedited section of a list of those recently chosen:
Sharat Bhat, Tongke Xue, Matthew Peairs, Wen Li, Jongmin
Baek, Aaron Kleinman, David Stolp, Andrew Schwartz, Rishi
Gupta, Jennifer Laaser, Inna Zakharevich, Neil Chua,
Jonathan Lowd, Simon Rubinsteinsalze, Joshua Batson,
Jimmy Jia, Jichao Qian, Dmitry Taubinsky, David Kaplan,
Erica Wilson, Kai Dai, Julian Kolev, Jonathan Xiong,
Stephen Guo.
Q.E.D.
Since his premise is not clearly stated, it isn't clear what he thinks
he's proven. There's every reason to believe that all those kids are
American kids, even though their names aren't Smith and Jones. And
this is the central fact that the author is forgetting: Smith and
Jones are no longer a dominant majority in this country, so of course
other names will appear. And perhaps those families, because they are
more recent immigrants, have more ambitious standards - that is a mark
of the families, and not the schools. But it is not a sign of
weakness in this country - America has always prospered by its
immigrants. It's just that the blue-bloods like to pretend that they
were the ones who made this country succeed because they were here
first (which is also wrong, since the Amerinds beat them here).
lojbab
--
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org
.
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| User: "Stewart Millen" |
|
| Title: Re: Johnny Can't Add But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can |
29 Jul 2003 12:44:16 PM |
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Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote in
news:okmciv0g06jso5khqn61fock9ncu68t6id@4ax.com:
usenet@mantra.com (Dr. Jai Maharaj) wrote:
Johnny Can't Add
But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can
By Fred Reed
Sunday, July 27, 2003
Why are members of these very small groups doing so much
of the important research for the United States? That's
easy. They're smart, they go into the sciences, and they
work hard. Potatoes are more mysterious. It's not
affirmative action. They produce. The qualifications of
these students can easily be checked. They have them. The
question is not whether these groups perform, or why, but
why the rest of us no longer do. What has happened?
Simple - there are no rewards for that kind of performance.
We reward hard work by ... more hard work. Successful
scientists and engineers are blessed with 60 hour weeks and
"no life".
I was talking to my brother-in-law about this social
phenomena. Young people today get conflicting messages:
21st-century capitalism broadcasts what I call
"leisure/consumption" values at them 24/7 as part of
their ad campaigns. And yet the underpinnings of said
capitalism rest on progress in the sciences and mechanical
arts, and mastering those fields requires behaviors nearly
completely antithetical to that of the consumer/leisure
message. It's little wonder then that kids from families
the least indoctrinated in the consumer/leisure values
are overrepresented.
What can be done? A la Marvin Harris, the same thing that
was done when the previous incarnation of when this happened:
make conspicious consumption bad form. And the best way to
do this is obliquely, to have a progressive income tax system
with high rates on upper income earners. As Harris noted,
once the display of wealth got you identified as someone
who *should* be paying high taxes, the kids of the rich
too started wearing tattered blue jeans, too. Equalitarian
societies suppress displays of individual power and wealth,
while hierarchical societies revel in them. Given the
economic demographics since the 1980s, it's little wonder
that as our society becomes more economically unequal,
gaining social prestige by overt consumerism and displays
of wealth have gotten more and more widespread. And the
long-term consequences and effects aren't good.
Stewart
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| User: "Chan-Ho Suh" |
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| Title: Re: Johnny Can't Add But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can |
29 Jul 2003 12:19:01 PM |
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On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 08:01:25 -0400, Bob LeChevalier wrote:
The Mathematical Association of America runs a contest for the extremely
bright and prepared among high-school students. It is called the United
States of America Mathematics Olympiad, and it "provides a means of
identifying and encouraging the most creative secondary mathematics
students in the country."
An unedited section of a list of those recently chosen: Sharat Bhat,
Tongke Xue, Matthew Peairs, Wen Li, Jongmin Baek, Aaron Kleinman, David
Stolp, Andrew Schwartz, Rishi Gupta, Jennifer Laaser, Inna Zakharevich,
Neil Chua, Jonathan Lowd, Simon Rubinsteinsalze, Joshua Batson, Jimmy
Jia, Jichao Qian, Dmitry Taubinsky, David Kaplan, Erica Wilson, Kai Dai,
Julian Kolev, Jonathan Xiong, Stephen Guo.
Q.E.D.
Since his premise is not clearly stated, it isn't clear what he thinks
he's proven. There's every reason to believe that all those kids are
American kids, even though their names aren't Smith and Jones. And this
is the central fact that the author is forgetting: Smith and Jones are no
longer a dominant majority in this country, so of course other names will
appear. And perhaps those families, because they are more recent
immigrants, have more ambitious standards - that is a mark of the
families, and not the schools. [...]
Yes, I was puzzled by this also. I've known many with names that would
sound very similar to those above, and many of them went through the same
ol' crappy educational system as every other American. The assumption
above is that "Stephen Guo", for example, is either a recent immigrant or
something of that sort, when for all we know, Stephen Guo's great
grandfather worked on the railroads in California.
This kind of assumption ends up meaning little but revealing some of the
biases that people who write this kind of material.
Perhaps the author was unfamiliar with "Johnny Venktasubramanian".
.
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| User: "Joni Rathbun" |
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| Title: Re: Johnny Can't Add But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can |
29 Jul 2003 11:42:58 AM |
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On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Bob LeChevalier wrote:
You just weren't aware of it. There was remedial college math in the
60s. Indeed, there were college students who had never taken Algebra,
though they were unlikely to be in a "solid school".
This was posted by Sam Lubell a few days ago:
"Yes, but nearly half (46%) of freshmen in remedial courses were over 22
(meaning they most likely finished high school three years before
enrolling) and 27% were over 30."
I would add that for the 46%, not only would it mean it was at least 3
years since they finished h.s., it could have 6 or 7 or more since they
took algebra which, at least in my experience, is usually a h.s. freshman
course.
(http://www.ihep.com/Pubs/PDF/Remediation.pdf)
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| User: "Joni Rathbun" |
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| Title: Re: Johnny Can't Add But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can |
29 Jul 2003 11:35:21 AM |
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On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Bob LeChevalier wrote:
usenet@mantra.com (Dr. Jai Maharaj) wrote:
Consider mathematics. In the mid-Sixties I took freshman
chemistry at Hampden-Sydney College, a solid school in
Virginia but not nearly MIT. It was assumed-assumed
without thought-that students knew algebra cold. They had
to. You can't do heavy loads of highly mathematical
homework, or wrestle with ideas like integrating
probability densities over three-space, or do endless
gas-law and reaction-rate calculations, if you aren't
sure how exponents work.
Remedial mathematics at the college level was unheard of.
You just weren't aware of it. There was remedial college math in the
60s. Indeed, there were college students who had never taken Algebra,
though they were unlikely to be in a "solid school".
By 1889, 80% of our colleges and universities had well established
preparatory/remedial programs in place. Today that number is 81%.
The % was similar in the 60s.
Not necessarily. They could be at a lesser college, or they could be
in a non-technical major. Why does an English Lit major need to know
algebra?
Yes, and, well, sometimes people change majors.
No one thought
about it. Today, remedial classes in both reading and
math are common at universities. We seem to be dumbing
ourselves to death.
Missing from this is that many of the people taking these remedial
classes are people returning to school after years in the workforce.
Someone elsewhere shared numbers on this recently. I may have saved
that post. I'll have to go look. Meanwhile, many are older, returning
students. Some are also immigrants. I had a student a couple years
ago who moved in during her senior year. She handled math quite well
but hadn't had time to get much of a handle on her English. The
University wisely accepted this very bright and determined girl - but
on the condition she enroll in "remedial" reading/writing.
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