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Re: Math, chemistry, engineering?
ER — (archived)

You won't get any argument from me. As for the cultural part, I think my cousin from Cuba (he has two kids born and educated through college in the US) his opinions are similar to mine on this issue. (He went to high school with me). He says (I paraphrase, of course);

"I don't understand Americans on this. You can get a good education here, we did. But they don't seem to care. It doesn't matter to them as much as it did to our parents, or to us, when we went to Brandon."

"It's different for kids here. In Cuba, you could be an athlete, or a lady's man, or a trouble maker, or a sissie, or a bully, or a loner, or popular, or the class clown, just like here. But it had no connection with your academic performance. Some kids were good students, others weren't, but you couldn't separate them into "brains" and "normal" people like they do here. You weren't socially punished if you were a good student, it had nothing to do with your standing with your classmates."

"In this country, kids pay a social price to excel in school, and even those that are willing to pay it tend to hide their achievement from others, except for their friends who are nerds just like them."

Rudy graduated with me, taking every course I did, and getting grades as good as mine, but he never went to college. With just his high school math and science, he eventually retired as a big shot at our local nuke plant, even though he lacked the Navy submarine training most of his subordinates and contemporaries had.

I don't think we're going to solve this problem by throwing money at it, or with standardized testing. It is cultural (they had an educational bureaucracy in Cuba, too, it wasn't invented here a generation ago). There is no Spanish word for "nerd".

In an era where we didn't need too many scientists and engineers and where a bright kid could pick up what he needed on the job, we got away with it. But that ain't gonna cut it any more.

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