US Still Lagging Behind

[Aaron]

Strong stuff, and kids eat it up. I'm sure it's quite effective at increasing enrollments and getting them to strive. But I'm not so sure it's entirely healthy on the psychi.

How so? Most kids already think they are a beautiful and unique snowflake, this is just weeding out the wheat from the chaff and not wasting time on the rugby players.

[sunnyside]

How so? Most kids already think they are a beautiful and unique snowflake.

True enough. But I think in general they also believe they're still a beautiful unique snowflake regardless of what they do, and that everybody else is one too.

The trick here is to get kids to define themselves in terms of accomplishments and achievements (particularly those related to R&D), and to value themselves and others based on that, not just feeling someone has woth because they're a person.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

Rather ironic since all the "cool stuff" they enjoy is the product of labor by geeks, dorks, and eggheads.

We are failing to get kids to connect with science; they're seeing pointless and boring drudgery without understanding the meaning behind it. Our culture does not value it, and they're being given formulas to use without seeing how elegant and interesting the underlying logic is and the applications (so says the engineering student ). We have shows like "Beauty and the Geek" wherein "geeks" are put on display for their lacking social skills and beauties who may not know how to construct a coherent sentence are admired.

[Tsukiyumi]

The trick here is to get kids to define themselves in terms of accomplishments and achievements (particularly those related to R&D), and to value themselves and others based on that, not just feeling someone has woth because they're a person.

I suggest that the true "value" of a person can't be measured by how many degrees they have.

Then again, I think 99% of people are unique pieces of crap; greedy conformist liars who spend their lives pushing other people under the bus to further their own goals.

But that's just my opinion.

[Reliant121]

See over here, our biggest problem is we pushed higher education too much and now there are so many people leaving university with degrees that actually mean fuck all. Dad's old work place was like it, students with high up social working degrees were meaningless.

Experience is what employers look for, and what students just dont have.

[sunnyside]

See over here, our biggest problem is we pushed higher education too much and now there are so many people leaving university with degrees that actually mean f**k all. Dad's old work place was like it, students with high up social working degrees were meaningless.

Experience is what employers look for, and what students just dont have.

Well, that's true here as well. We don't have a problem here getting people into higher education. Even the partiers that never got better than a C tend to want to go to college.

But what we need are workaholic top flight engineers and researchers, not the steaming pile of liberal arts and "management information systems" degrees we're getting in droves. That's even true of "advanced" degreeis in many fields, it's something like "Ah I see you have Ph.D.s in history and Japanese liturature", very nice, now, let me show you how to work the cash register.

[Mikey]

Parental attitudes are a problem, also. At least in many East Coast inner-city areas, there is a predominant valuation of school as child care, not as an important tool for life. There is also a lack of respect for the educational system as requiring discipline. When I got sent home with an indicator of school punishment, my folks asked me, "What did you do?" Now, parents ask, "What did they do to you?"