What ever happened to teaching STEM in our schools? Seems like it has shifted to "Race" only. Here are my ideas.
Most people have to know that the economic currency of the future is technical and intellectual. The world of the past may have been driven my "muscle" power, but that is now ancient history. We can not enter the future by looking in the rear view mirror. We have to plan for the future. The school teachers that I had over 60 years ago were not cut from the best cloth, but they were very significantly better than our school teachers of today. It was clear to me over 60 years ago that college students who did not have the ability to compete in STEM could still attend and graduate from "teacher's colleges". It has only accelerated over the past 60 years until we are now close to the bottom, What do we need to "build back better?"
China is now the world's technical leader and they have more young engineers and scientists coming on line every day. For the USA to catch up, we have to first stop going down and I am not sure we have the back bone to do that. If it was possible to stop going down, it would still be impossible for the USA to focus more on STEM than does China today. Does that make you wonder what kind of world our children and grandchildren will be living in? It should!
The USA is currently about 40th in math while China is near the top. Remember that Apple Computer company does not make a single product here in the USA. We might export corn and soy beans, but how can we ever expect to win the economic battle with only our farmers? Notice that it is still OK to mine coal, but not use it here in the USA. That is why most of our coal ends up in China where they burn it and the prevailing Westward wind carries the pollutants back here to the USA. Now, back to STEM.
What our schools need to do is to "weave" technology into as many classes as possible. Notice that our schools are now doing this same thing with race, so we know they can do it if they wanted too. There are all kinds of important technical people through out history who have very interesting stories. If you look at Columbus and his discovery of the New World, that is also a significant technical story too. Just the navigation teaches math and all kinds of other areas. Just think about the building of their ships or the preservation of food. Like going to the Moon, many important technical problems had to be solved back in 1492.
All teachers should be competent to some minimum level in technology. I know for sure that many of our teachers today could not pass a simple technical test. I know that many would say that they do not need to know things that they do not teach, but that is not true. They need to use examples in their classes that draw from the technical world. It does not matter what they are teaching, they need examples to help them carry their points. I think that in our English classes, they should teach procedure writing and those procedure should contain some kind of technical element.
Look at our own Civil War. Not only was there social and political factors, but there were also many very technical parts. Think about the roll the telegraph played or the first iron clad ships. Even the guns that were used experienced rapid changes in design and manufacturing methods. When the war started 90% of rifles were smooth bored and thus not very accurate, but by the end of the wars 90% were "rifled" and were much more accurate. This is one reason so many were killed and the battle strategies were so out of date.
The same could also be said for food that Columbus took back to Europe from the New World. It was the seed that caused the industrial revolution in Europe. How about the cotton gin? When I was in high school, we made our own "cloud chamber" so that we could view sub atomic particles from Radium. Remember the day when the numbers on our watches glowed in the dark? I learned how it worked back in high school, but you can bet "zero" of our kids today have learned this technical lesson.
What this going to mean is that we need to dump our separate teacher's colleges and require that our teachers attend regular colleges and universities. They might take a couple of semesters about teaching, but it does not require a special teacher's college. I even fill that we should dump our Federal Department of Education and even at the state level too. Individual school districts should be competent enough to run their own schools. Private colleges and schools do not seem to be having a problem so why to we need so much meddling from our central government?
Notice that I was qualified to teach at a major university graduate and under graduate classes, but I could not teach a second grader in one of our public schools? That is crazy and we all know it. I could get into the impact of labor unions in our schools, but that is another blog.
