LOOK at your cell phone. No, seriously: the embed below will hopefully inspire you to.
Your smart phone, your Kindle, your Nook, your pad (name the brand), your flat screen mounted proudly above your fireplaces are not the result of "magic," wishful thinking or dumb luck. The skills required to understand and design them are as accessible as an open book, electronic or analog pulp variety, and the will to read it and work out the difficulties with the material.
The technological advances you enjoy will not create themselves in perpetuity. You need scientists, engineers; you need an education system that prepares our youth for the competition that in every other country is advancing quite successfully. We are once again lagging international PISA results, albeit in this country, biased by socioeconomic factors (purposely, my hypothesis) not accounted for in the PISA eval. Wealthy kids against the globe do reasonably well; inner city children have myriad challenges for their attention. The testing curriculum in this country also assumes no impact from social stratification.
We can, as national ostriches with our heads buried in sand and up our collective anal cavities, ignore this disparity; continue on our inane "teach-to-the-test" regime, or accept our coming decline gracefully. Magic nor magical thinking* will be our salvation (STEM will, if allowed), and grace is something from the American electorate I've seen wanting.
Your smart phone, your Kindle, your Nook, your pad (name the brand), your flat screen mounted proudly above your fireplaces are not the result of "magic," wishful thinking or dumb luck. The skills required to understand and design them are as accessible as an open book, electronic or analog pulp variety, and the will to read it and work out the difficulties with the material.
The technological advances you enjoy will not create themselves in perpetuity. You need scientists, engineers; you need an education system that prepares our youth for the competition that in every other country is advancing quite successfully. We are once again lagging international PISA results, albeit in this country, biased by socioeconomic factors (purposely, my hypothesis) not accounted for in the PISA eval. Wealthy kids against the globe do reasonably well; inner city children have myriad challenges for their attention. The testing curriculum in this country also assumes no impact from social stratification.
We can, as national ostriches with our heads buried in sand and up our collective anal cavities, ignore this disparity; continue on our inane "teach-to-the-test" regime, or accept our coming decline gracefully. Magic nor magical thinking* will be our salvation (STEM will, if allowed), and grace is something from the American electorate I've seen wanting.
* "A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising, an explanation based on will rather than knowledge. There is no truth, in either the moral or the scientific sense." Adolf Hitler (Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as A Candle in the Dark," Chapter 14 - Anti-science)
* "The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
—Unnamed White House aide[1]
The quote is now widely attributed to Karl Rove. (Rational Wiki)
More at: Science.NASA.gov
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