Former U.S. Education Secretary: 'We're top 10 in nothing'

[kazam]

Our population is too huge to compete with countries the size of a state or one of our cities. We have the best Universities in the World and our top students always rank high.

The 11 most educated Countries in the world according to many sources including Buisness Insider:

1.Singapore
2. Finland
3.Netherlands
4.Swiss
5.Belgium
6. Denmark
7. Norway
8. US
9. Australia
10. New Zealand

post your source

 

[PrinceOfPain]

That's the humanities and social sciences.

Okay.

 

[NoDak]

he was specifically talking about k-12.

Yea, I know.

Okay.

...There's no retards in STEM.

 

[NoDak]

We can continue getting on for a while with the domestic cream of the crop carrying the weight of the masses on its shoulders in addition to draining talent from all over the globe, but at some point (like now) this sort of shit needs addressing.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america?

* After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place. The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50% of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries;

* The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77% didn't know that George Washington was the first President; couldn't name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence; and only 2.8% of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5% of students passed the civics test;

* According to the National Research Council report, only 28% of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13% of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design;"

* 18% of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll;

* The American Association of State Colleges and Universities report on education shows that the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the proportion of the population aged 35-64 with a college degree, but 19th in the percentage of those aged 25-34 with an associate or high school diploma, which means that for the first time, the educational attainment of young people will be lower than their parents;

* 74% of Republicans in the U.S. Senate and 53% in the House of Representatives deny the validity of climate change despite the findings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and every other significant scientific organization in the world;

* According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 68% of public school children in the U.S. do not read proficiently by the time they finish third grade. And the U.S. News & World reported that barely 50% of students are ready for college level reading when they graduate;

* According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important;"

* According to the National Endowment for the Arts report in 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later only 67% did. And more than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book--fiction or nonfiction--over the course of a year. The proportion of 17 year olds who read nothing (unless required by school) has doubled between 1984-2004;

* Gallup released a poll indicating 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago;

* A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.

Evolutionsbremse.

Flat Earth. Flat Brain. Flat Line.

Fat People, Fallen Arches and Flat Feet (Yuck).

 

[Pessimystic]

I’m sure Betsy is on top of it

Apparently her predecessor wasn't.

 

[horc00]

- If we are so bad, why do students from around the world flock to our universities?

America has some of the best universities in the world and attracts international talent which makes up a large proportion of both students and teaching staff.

But the criticism of America's education is mostly on its public schools at primary and secondary level.

 

[NoDak]

America has some of the best universities in the world and attracts international talent which makes up a large proportion of both students and teaching staff.

But the criticism of America's education is mostly on its public schools at primary and secondary level.

Bingo, and if the Nature Index on the previous page didn't spell it out in clear enough terms perhaps the below will. The US is leaps and bounds on top of the world at the highest level - but only at the very highest. It can manage for now, but not indefinitely.

Oxford Academic: European Paradox or Delusion - Are European Science and Economy Outdated?

The European Union (EU) seems to presume that the mass production of European research papers indicates that Europe is a leading scientific power, and the so-called European paradox of strong science but weak technology is due to inefficiencies in the utilization of this top level European science by European industry. We fundamentally disagree, and will show that Europe lags far behind the USA in the production of important, highly cited research.

We will show that there is a consistent weakening of European science as one ascends the citation scale, with the EU almost twice as effective in the production of minimal impact papers, while the USA is at least twice as effective in the production of very highly cited scientific papers, and garnering Nobel prizes. Only in the highly multinational, collaborative fields of physics and clinical medicine does the EU seem to approach the USA in top scale impact.

Does the US have a GDP twice that of the EU? No. Does it spend twice as much on R&D? No. It has about 185 million fewer people though.

 

[horc00]

Bingo, and if the Nature Index on the previous page didn't spell it out in clear enough terms perhaps the below will. The US is leaps and bounds on top of the world at the highest level - but only at the very highest. It can manage for now, but not indefinitely.

Oxford Academic: European Paradox or Delusion - Are European Science and Economy Outdated?

The European Union (EU) seems to presume that the mass production of European research papers indicates that Europe is a leading scientific power, and the so-called European paradox of strong science but weak technology is due to inefficiencies in the utilization of this top level European science by European industry. We fundamentally disagree, and will show that Europe lags far behind the USA in the production of important, highly cited research.

We will show that there is a consistent weakening of European science as one ascends the citation scale, with the EU almost twice as effective in the production of minimal impact papers, while the USA is at least twice as effective in the production of very highly cited scientific papers, and garnering Nobel prizes. Only in the highly multinational, collaborative fields of physics and clinical medicine does the EU seem to approach the USA in top scale impact.

Does the US have a GDP twice that of the EU? No. Does it spend twice as much on R&D? No. It has about 185 million fewer people though.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Worldwide University rankings are often gauged by the research papers written by professors and/or post-graduate students. And many highly-ranked European universities and some Asian ones like those in Singapore churn out research papers with not many applicable underlying purposes behind them.

 

[NoDak]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Worldwide University rankings are often gauged by the research papers written by professors and/or post-graduate students. And many highly-ranked European universities and some Asian ones like those in Singapore churn out research papers with not many applicable underlying purposes behind them.

That's correct for the most part although different rankings place a varying level of emphasis on that and there are a handful of them. US institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Caltech are the pinnacle of higher education with the research clout to prove it. I wish I was smart enough to get into a grad program for one of them but, alas, I'm not.

In principle, fundamental research isn't done for the purpose of direct application in the form of products and processes and you can't patent scientific theories or discoveries made in nature. That isn't the motivation, rather it's knowledge for the value of knowing and you don't know all of the possibilities for future practical use as it's often not immediately apparent.

For example, the physics showing that travel to the moon was possible came around 280 years before it actually happened and was put to direct use, the recent breakthrough in applied QKD technology from China last year is essentially circa 1920s era science, etc.

A lot of the papers from the EU and Asia scoring lower on the citation scale is due largely to the studies reproducing and following up and/or adding to previous work as opposed to being wholly original, nevermind groundbreaking (that's rare).

In the US, most applied research is carried out at government laboratories rather than universities such JPL, Los Alamos, LBNL, LLNL and they have department sponsors (Defense, Energy, NASA) with independent non-profit 'contractors' to manage them. Some of the latter actually do include the aforementioned universities though.

 

[Darth_Inv1ctu5]

At the risk of sounding smug, do it. University is very very cheap here. I can recommend better countries than Belgium in terms of scenery and people, but our schools are top notch.

Hell, I'd move just for the beer I don't need much to be sold on Belgium

 

[OverCoronavirus Pressure]

Just think, after Sputnik, the US felt embarrassed and began a vigorous National program to invest our children in the sciences.

... I'm sure Betsy will make great strides towards the improvement of our educational syst...

I can't write the end of that sentence, my brain won't let me.

 

[NoDak]

Just think, after Sputnik, the US felt embarrassed and began a vigorous National program to invest our children in the sciences.

... I'm sure Betsy will make great strides towards the improvement of our educational syst...

I can't write the end of that sentence, my brain won't let me.

Richard Feynman should be running the US Department of Education, arguably the greatest American-born scientist of the 20th century. Unfortunately, he died 30 years ago. An awesome excerpt from his recollection of serving on the State of California's Curriculum Commission for how they chose math textbooks for use in public schools. Not for the TL;DR crowd.

For the unaware:

Richard Phillips Feynman (/ˈfaɪnmən/; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.

Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

It happened that a lot of the books were on a new method of teaching arithmetic that they called "new math," and since usually the only people to look at the books were schoolteachers or administrators in education, they thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who uses mathematics scientifically, who knows what the end product is and what we're trying to teach it for, to help in the evaluation of the schoolbooks.

I must have had, by this time, a guilty feeling about not cooperating with the government, because I agreed to get on this committee.

Immediately I began getting letters and telephone calls from schoolbook publishers. They said things like, "We're very glad to hear you're on the committee because we really wanted a scientific guy..." and "It's wonderful to have a scientist on the committee, because our books are scientifically oriented..." But they also said things like, "We'd like to explain to you what our book is about..." and "We'll be very glad to help you in any way we can to judge our books..."

That seemed to me kind of crazy. I'm an objective scientist, and it seemed to me that since the only thing the kids in school are going to get is the books (and the teachers get the teacher's manual, which I would also get), any extra explanation from the company was a distortion. So I didn't want to speak to any of the publishers and always replied, "You don't have to explain; I'm sure the books will speak for themselves."

A few days later a guy from the book depository called me up and said, "We're ready to send you the books, Mr. Feynman; there are three hundred pounds."

I was overwhelmed.

"It's all right, Mr. Feynman; we'll get someone to help you read them."

I couldn't figure out how you do that: you either read them or you don't read them. I had a special bookshelf put in my study downstairs (the books took up seventeen feet), and began reading all the books that were going to be discussed in the next meeting. We were going to start out with the elementary schoolbooks.

It was a pretty big job, and I worked all the time at it down in the basement. My wife says that during this period it was like living over a volcano. It would be quiet for a while, but then all of a sudden, "BLLLLLOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!" -- there would be a big explosion from the "volcano" below.

The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous -- they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.

I understood what they were trying to do. Many [Americans] thought we were behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to give advice on how to teach math by using some of the rather interesting modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for the children who found it dull.

Finally I come to a book that says, "Mathematics is used in science in many ways. We will give you an example from astronomy, which is the science of stars." I turn the page, and it says, "Red stars have a temperature of four thousand degrees, yellow stars have a temperature of five thousand degrees..." -- so far, so good. It continues: "Green stars have a temperature of seven thousand degrees, blue stars have a temperature of ten thousand degrees, and violet stars have a temperature of... (some big number)."

There are no green or violet stars, but the figures for the others are roughly correct. It's vaguely right -- but already, trouble! That's the way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn't know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don't quite understand what they're talking about, I cannot understand. I don't know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!

 

[OverCoronavirus Pressure]

Richard Feynman should be running the US Department of Education, arguably the greatest American-born scientist of the 20th century. Unfortunately, he died 30 years ago. An awesome excerpt from his recollection of serving on the State of California's Curriculum Commission for how they chose math textbooks for use in public schools. Not for the TL;DR crowd.

For the unaware:

Richard Phillips Feynman (/ˈfaɪnmən/; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.

Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Surely, you're joking.

Spoiler

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You're_Joking,_Mr._Feynman!

Killer post
<{monica}>

 

[TheLastSpartan]

We can't focus on education or anything else when the defense budget is so significantly underfunded. We're not even at a trillion yet. Priorities, ppl.

 

[NoDak]

We can't focus on education or anything else when the defense budget is so significantly underfunded. We're not even at a trillion yet. Priorities, ppl.

I mean, if you're going to blow that much money on defense you should probably redirect more of it towards R&D as the results have historically turned out to be rather consequential for technological advancement on the whole. As it is now, that particular sub-budget is $14.8 billion for FY2018.

https://www.ft.com/content/8c0152d2-d0f2-11e2-be7b-00144feab7de

Many of these technologies have their financial roots in government grants, that supported early research into complex concepts, or military contracts, that provided revenues alongside commercial sales of an early product, such as semiconductors. Such products form the technical foundation of modern electronics from radios to phones to computers.

“All of modern high tech has the US Department of Defense to thank at its core, because this is where the money came from to be able to develop a lot of what is driving the technology that we’re using today,” said Leslie Berlin, historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University.

Even the networking backbone that supports the modern global internet was first built by researchers funded by an early iteration the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA provides money from the Department of Defense to develop technologies for military use.

Many technologies used widely today are rooted in DARPA-backed research, from the user interface that powers a Windows laptop to Siri, the voice of the Apple iPhone. Siri was developed out of a project backed by SRI International, a nonprofit research organization with funding from DARPA, which aimed to integrate various aspects of artificial intelligence into a virtual assistant that could learn and evolve without constant follow-up coding.

 

[I Am Legion]

post your source

https://nordic.businessinsider.com/...-most-educated-countries-in-the-world-2016-10

 

[I Am Legion]

I never said it was great, their education system is just incredibly more efficient. They get more done with less resources and service a much larger population.

It's not limited to China. Many other countries have much better results than our own.

That's all.

My buddy’s wife is from China and is a teacher. She said the reports are false. School is only mandatory for 9 years, and most of the country is rural farmland where she said it’s 3rd world with huge amounts of illiteracy. Just like the US, a country of that size is too big to compare to small countries.

 

[NoDak]

My buddy’s wife is from China and is a teacher. She said the reports are false. School is only mandatory for 9 years, and most of the country is rural farmland where she said it’s 3rd world with huge amounts of illiteracy. Just like the US, a country of that size is too big to compare to small countries.

This is a bit of repost from elsewhere and again more to do with upper level education, but contemporary China lacks the culture and environment for genuine innovation, their young talent isn't nurtured to think in the abstract - it's all rote - and they have a social/political system in place that actively works to inhibit it. Chasing that homogeneous Han 'dream' doesn't help. They will NOT surpass the United States scientifically nor technologically, sorry y'all.

SCMP: A Century On, China Still Lacks The Drive For Scientific Truth, Says Outspoken Editor

@HomerThompson

 

[Kindacrazy]

This is a direct result of Frankfurt school philosophies. When they started designing the curriculum around the idea of producing socially just results instead of simply producing the most competent students the US immediately began to suffer. For example, systemic changes were made to the k-12 education system in order to produce egalitarian results between men and women. One of those changes was a focus on changing the grading to favor students who did better on their classwork and homework while reducing the relevance of testing. Unfortunately since testing is the closest school gets to simulating real world competence we have seen a decline in the average competence of students.

 

[PolishHeadlock]

The poorest performing schools in my area get over $7,000 per student per year. The highest performing schools get waaaay less, closer to $3,000 per student.
Those numbers include free lunches, and the like, but they are NOT underfunded.

lol going to need a source on this