Last week, Bill Gates testified before Congress that American business needs more math and science grads, but probably won't get them--and will therefore need to import them from abroad.
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Screw that. If American business wants more math and science majors they should consider paying them more. We engineers are partly at fault for this though. Our anti-union and voluntary license to practice have hurt our ability to command salaries like the law and medical professions do.
ReplyDeleteHey Ted,
ReplyDeleteThis is very funny and very poignant.
The purging of the arts from the education system in the US did not yield an improvement in math & science. Now that people are realizing the connection between the arts and higher achievement in M&S they are starting to want a more balanced approach.....but of course in the context of M&S.
What does M&S get us? More production, more efficiency, and a workforce devoid of critical thinking and the ability to contextualize their existence (biography) with their context (history)..in other words, Mills' Sociological Imagination.
All this leads essentially to generations of technically gifted, but culturally illiterate serfs. They may have technical skills to be told what to do, but they have no concept of citizenship, and thus democracy flies out the window and we all sit around and wait for the technological train wreck to hit us....most likely it will be environmental and food related.
I suggest everyone reading this go get in touch with local farmers who are oriented toward multifunctional farming and start developing a relationship.
Has anyone asked why math & science are so important? You should all force your leaders to explain specifically why math and science are important.
So China does it better.....I wouldn't want to live in China, or go through their educational system.
Please don't be fooled by Bill Gates, as he's been one of many "captains of the tech industry" that have been sounding this alarm ..... forever.
ReplyDeleteThe issue is not a shortage of tech talent, it's a shortage of CHEAP tech talent. These alarmists would have you believe that India and China are churning out genius level engineers by the millions, and it's just a matter of letting them in.
They're not, and it's not.
The fact is that most of the Indian (and probably Chinese) talent are being crammed through 2-year tech mills, and are basically code monkeys. They are NOT going to be innovative engineers that give the US the competitive edge that currently exists. What they DO provide is a low-cost alternative to the high-priced American engineers here in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Bill Gates should be ashamed for continuing this little game, but he has no shame.
I work as an engineer in Silicon Valley for a small, but high-profile company. I can tell you from first-hand experience that our CFO is constantly trying to outsource projects to India, on the cheap. He can't. Why not? Because the needed talent in India is not there anymore. Their best people are tapped out, and are getting comparatively expensive. The superior talent is not there.
Also - I agree with other posts on the fact that it was (and is) a mistake in education to drop everything in favor of stressing only math and science. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who switched from the music program in college to physics after 3 years. He tells my people always ask him why he switched. The answer: "physics was easier".
How does math and science education lead to a void of critical thinking?
ReplyDelete"Has anyone asked why math & science are so important?"
ReplyDeleteThey gave us the Internet you are writing on, the car you drive (or the bus/subway if you don't), and the ability to live to 80.
That said, we do need the historians, the poets, and the intellectuals to keep the nation from veering into Zamyatin's "We."
jludtke,
ReplyDeleteIt is impossible to function in math and science without critical thinking skills. I believe that was the point you wanted to make, and you are correct, as far as it goes. So, math and science training that completely extinguished critical thinking would be of no use at all.
However, training in math and science alone tends to focus critical thinking into those areas. Haven't you seen technology solutions that give a 6-significant-figure answer to the wrong question? Or where the answer works "technically," but is worthless in long-term, real-world context?
It's true that liberal education doesn't guarantee broad views and deep thought, but math-and-science only education nearly guarantees narrow views and shallow thought.
The history of modern education is littered with failed attempts to produce graduates who will think only when and only about what they're told. The "Institutes," the various outcome-based education systems, NCLB -- all aimed to provide just enough education for their day's equivalent of a 'cube rat' or 'salary man.'
It never works. Anyone whose education allows them to think outside the box inevitably starts thinking outside the cube as well.
wfar (works_for_a_republican)
I retired after almost 35 years in
ReplyDeleteengineering and I can emphatically
tell you that there is and never was shortage of engineers. It is myth propogated by corporate America to use it as an execuse to import engineers or outsource engineering jobs to offshore with the result that salaries of engineers in the last 10 years have gone down if you factor in inflation. If there is a shortage
of engineers then their salaries should have gone up not down.
Bill gate is a bull-shit artist.
"How does math and science education lead to a void of critical thinking?"
ReplyDeleteThere is more to critical thinking than math and science. In fact, you need to understand quite a bit about math and science to think critically because it is a very good way to look at some problems.
To the extent that anyone believes that math and science can or ever will provide a method for forming or answering all questions or even the most important questions, a void in the capacity for critical thought is exposed.
It is easy to work with caricatures of disciplines and to make sweeping judgments about them. It is much more difficult to come to grips with the questions and problems they attempt to address. Even the phrase, "critical thought," has been turned into something meaningless.
The specific answer to this question can be found by looking at the curriculum of various programs, i.e., how much time is spent coming to grips with particular problems and the ways of exploring them. An introductory class or two in any subject teaches very little and even a four-year degree in an area is just a beginning. Four year engineering programs are typically more like learning a trade. This is not meant negatively because there is a great deal that must be learned. So much, in fact, that there is little time to explore much else.
The same could be said for any four year program in the human sciences like politics, sociology, etc although, from what I've seen, there is typically more of a demand to master areas of science and mathematics that bear on the particular discipline. The overall situation makes some sense because natural science has a narrower focus, i.e., it does not directly address political and social problems while disciplines concerned with those topics often need to understand how particular areas of science are involved in particular problems.
Many good scientists and technical people can be very adept at critical thinking but, if they are, it is because they have taken the time and effort to read and to think beyond the boundaries of their field. Here I need to underscore "read" because simply sitting around speculating with very little grounding in prior thought, history and so on, does not produce very good results. The situation is no different than someone who has a cursory understanding of how a computer works and thinks that is enough to really build one.
Hey Folks,
ReplyDeleteI want to thank several of you for clarifying my sharp and insufficient critique of emphasizing M&S only. WFAR's statement was more to the point I wanted to make, which is that if we concentrate on training scientists and engineers in a very narrow technical area, they tend to see the technology they work on as a vast solution that society should just conform to, and operate devoid of the human equation, asking who benefits from a change in technological operations, etc.
This is what the Science and Technology Studies focuses on (Bruno Latour is a good starting point, but not the only one). In short, if you give someone a hammer, suddenly everything needs hammering.
We have the same problem with a bloated military. Suddenly the world's problems can be fixed by military solutions....even when all the evidence we have says no.
Why? Because the structure exists for money and capital to flow, and then the bureaucracies created to manage it start to defend it...and nobody asks "is this contributing to a higher quality of life, a sustainable existence?" etc.
Certainly we have a technologically advanced existence, but throwing those examples out as a justification for the technoscientific disasters we've also experienced is not an excuse to shut down discourse over how technology is used (to make a few people filthy rich while we strip mine the planet). Sure some people live to be 80, how many die before they're 20? The big picture is not a dichotomous choice between one or the other.
I've only been practicing engineering for a year so I can speak with the authority of the other engineers who posted here but my sense is that we've swallowed a bit too much libertarianism in our profession. This from a former due paying member of the Libertarian party. With the exception of civil and structural engineers we haven't really defended our profession from outsourcing because deep down we appreciate efficiency and think that there are times when outsource is efficient and unions are inefficient (hammered home by manufacturing engineers who can't move their computer without calling a certified electrician to unplug it for them).
ReplyDeleteUnions may raise costs but they also raise wages. I say, let all the Indians and Chinese into this country that want to come. Just make them pass the PE exam and join a union. If anyone could make a union work sanely it would be engineers.
As for the value of science and math, the fact that people question evolution is answer enough.
ReplyDeleteA couple points:
ReplyDelete1) If "science" in all its infinite glory and monopoly on Truth with a capital T was so sure of itself, than challenges to its findings, even such as evolution, would not pose a threat. They pose a threat because of the structure of our political system, not because people 'just don't get the obvious.'
Of all people, you would expect scientists to welcome challenges to concepts, after all that is what strengthens them. The scientific method is based on systematically disproving contemporary knowledge with methodically derived evidence, not the other way around.
2) In response to Andy, I wholeheartedly agree. I am the son of a classic Rush Limbaugh loving electrical engineer from the old Ma Bell system (matriculated through AT&T, Lucent, IBM, and "early retirement"). He even witnessed his Lucent nest egg dissolve Enron style and is still the same.
These people did drink the Libertarian Kool-Aid, which convinced them that the social hierarchy was derived from individual merit, that social structure doesn't really exist and that we are all a bunch of Horatio Algers.
They all voted for Reagan when Seymour Melman was writing "Alternative Criteria for the Design of the Means of Production." -(Theory & Society, 1981: 10:325-36)
My personal experience with the few engineers I know is that they think extremely hard in a very narrow reality, but have put enormous effort into it and therefore assume enormous competence in everything, yet fall sucker to Swiftboat Veterans for Truth and can't figure out why they're supporting a war they know is illegal, but that the President had every right to prosecute...even though it was illegal....because he's a really smart man...otherwise how would he be President??
Lastly, a word about efficiency. Economists are JUST NOW starting to get this...a little bit...at least in agricultural economics. Ya know...humans aren't efficient, nor is democracy. One can argue that 'nature' is efficient but then you have to define 'nature' and even then it's a tautological statement.
The fact is, notions of efficiency have their place, as do the narrowly obsessed experts. The problems start to arise when we do not have balance.
Earl Butts of the USDA (Nixon years) once famously stated "get big or get out" of agriculture.
First lesson of growing: Reap what you sow.
Aggie, way back when, in the closing minutes before 9/11, I was a Chauffeur. Lucky for me I was off that day or I would have been at the WTC when the planes hit. One day, pre-9/11, I had a client who couldn't drive to a meeting because she had broken her leg. The destination was The Lucent offices in Pennsylvania. The doctors must have prescribed her with heavy pain killers beacause her tongue was quite loose. In her drug-addled state, she told me that she was a Lucent Executive that was about to torpedo a large part of the workforce. The number she revealed slips my mind. Was it two hundred thousand? Anyway, I was under oath not to discuss the things I heard while working for the company, so I kept it to myself. Over the following weeks,just by chance, I transported more of Lucent's staff to other meetings in Pennsylvania. The passengers usually totalled three. As the talked amongest themselves, I realised that they were headed to meetings to discuss how many were to be laid off. They all had a low figure in mind and that they would be spared, but they were wrong . Three times I played the undertaker bringing the dead to their funerals. It was terrible. So many smiling, talkative people dumbstruck, shell-shocked and comatose on the return trip. I've been privy to a lot of things in this world, so much that I sometimes feel like Forrest Gump, although I look like Lt. Dan. Dorme bene.... p.s. I totally disavow all of these statments,just like the Bushies do.
ReplyDeleteI would like to add my emphasis to Andy's comment. I spent 20 some years as a civil engineer and never made any more than (or even as much as) my kindergarten teacher neighbor.
ReplyDeleteFormer civil student here.
ReplyDeleteGlad I got out of that ritalin-laced nightmare. I remember trying to get some students together to form a chapter of ASCE or EWB, and they looked at me like they couldn't believe anyone would want to do anything other than study for tests. I have friends who did not get out. They are now miserably married and house poor, working on drainage schemes for new hotels. Though, Engineers are supposedly one of the happiest professions...
we are a little off subject though, aren't we? Perhaps I missed the point of the toon. While education is cut again and again, businesses will hire from abroad.
As long as they pay the new workers at a fair wage, with fair benefits, that is okay with me.