Johnny Can't Add

The other day I went to the Web site of Bell Labs, one of the country's premier research outfits. I clicked at random on a research project, Programmable Networks for Tomorrow. The scientists working on the project were Gisli Hjalmstysson, Nikos Anerousis, Pawan Goyal, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jennifer Rexford, Kobus Van der Merwe, and Sneha Kumar Kasera.

Clicking again at random, this time on the Information Visualization Research Group, the research team turned out to be John Ellson, Emden Gansner, John Mocenigo, Stephen North, Jeffery Korn, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Bin Wei, Shankar Krishnan, and Suresh Venktasubramanian.

Here is a pattern I've noticed in countless organizations at the high end of the research spectrum. In the personnel lists, certain groups are phenomenally over-represented with respect to their appearance in the general American population: Chinese, Koreans, Indians, and, though it doesn't show in the above lists, Jews. What the precise statistical breakdown across the world of American research might be, I don't know. An awful lot of personnel lists look like the foregoing.

Think about this: Asians make up a small percent of the population, yet there are company directories in Silicon Valley that read like a New Delhi phone book. Many of our premier universities have become heavily Asian, with many of these students going into the sciences. If Chinese citizens and Americans of Chinese descent left tomorrow for Beijing, American research, and graduate schools in the sciences and engineering, would be crippled.

Jews are two or three percent of the population. On the rough-cut assumption that Goldstein is probably Jewish, and Ferguson probably isn't, it is evident that Jews are doing lots more than their share of research-and, given that people named Miller may well be Jewish, the name-recognition approach probably produces a substantial undercount. I asked a friend, researching a book on Harvard, the percentage of Asian and Jewish students. Answer: "Asians close to 20%. Jews close to 25%-unofficial, because you are allowed to list by gender, ethnicity, geography, but not religion. Our last taboo."

None of this is original with me. In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences released a study noting that over half of U.S. engineering doctorates are awarded to foreign students. Where are Smith and Jones?

Why are members of these very small groups doing so much of the important research for the United States? That's easy. They're smart, they go into the sciences, and they work hard. Potatoes are more mysterious. It's not affirmative action. They produce. The qualifications of these students can easily be checked. They have them. The question is not whether these groups perform, or why, but why the rest of us no longer do. What has happened?

It is not an easy question, but a lot of it, I think, is the deliberate enstupidation of American education. Again, the idea is not original with me. Said the American Educational Research Association of the NAS report, "Serious deficiencies in American pre-college education, along with wavering support for basic research, were cited by the panel as major contributors to this problem."

Consider mathematics. In the mid-Sixties I took freshman chemistry at Hampden-Sydney College, a solid school in Virginia but not nearly MIT. It was assumed-assumed without thought-that students knew algebra cold. They had to. You can't do heavy loads of highly mathematical homework, or wrestle with ideas like integrating probability densities over three-space, or do endless gas-law and reaction-rate calculations, if you aren't sure how exponents work.

Remedial mathematics at the college level was unheard of. The assumption was that people who weren't ready for college work should be somewhere else. No one thought about it. Today, remedial classes in both reading and math are common at universities. We seem to be dumbing ourselves to death.

I recently had children go through the high schools of Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington. I watched them come home with badly misspelled chemistry handouts from half-educated teachers, watched them do stupid, make-work science projects that taught them nothing about the sciences but used lots of pretty paper.

The extent of scholastic decline is sometimes astonishing. So help me, I once saw, in a middle school in Arlington, a student's project on a bulletin board celebrating Enrico Fermi's contributions to "Nucler Physicts" (Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee champions: 2003, Sai Guntuyri; 2002, Pratyush Buddiga; 2001, Sean Conley; 2000, George Thampy; 1999, Nupur Lala).

It appears that a few groups are keeping their standards up and the rest of us are drowning our children in self-indulgent social engineering, political correctness, and feel-good substitutes for learning.

Some of our growing dependency is hidden. We do not merely rely on small industrious groups in America and on foreigners working here. Increasingly the United States contracts out its technical thinking to Asia.

If you read technically aware publications like Wired magazine (and how many people do?), you find that major American corporations have more and more of their computer programming done by people in, for example, India. In cities like Bombay, large colonies of Indians work for U.S. companies by Internet. This again means that counting names at American institutions underestimates the growth of intellectual dependence.

The Indians, and others, have discovered the suddenly important principle that intellectual capital is separable from physical capital. To program for Boeing, you don't have to be anywhere near Seattle. Nor do you need an aircraft plant. All you need is a $700 computer, a book called something like How to Program in C++, and a fast Internet connection. Crucial work like circuit-design can now be done abroad by bright people who don't need chip factories. They need workstations, the Internet, and engineering degrees.

This too we would be wise to ponder. Americans often think of India chiefly as a land of ghastly poverty. Well, yes. It is also a country with about three times our population and a lot of very bright people who want to get ahead. They're professionally hungry. We no longer are.

People speak of globalization. This is it, and it's just beginning. Where will it take us? How long can we maintain a technologically dominant economy if we are, as a country, no longer willing to do our own thinking? If we rely heavily on less than 10 percent of our own population while employing more and more foreigners abroad?

It's not them. It's us. I've heard the phrase, "the Asian challenge to the West." I don't think so. When Sally Chen gets a doctorate in biochemistry, she's not challenging America. She's getting a doctorate in biochemistry. Those who study have no reason to apologize to those who don't.

The Mathematical Association of America runs a contest for the extremely bright and prepared among high-school students. It is called the United States of America Mathematics Olympiad, and it "provides a means of identifying and encouraging the most creative secondary mathematics students in the country."

An unedited section of a list of those recently chosen: Sharat Bhat, Tongke Xue, Matthew Peairs, Wen Li, Jongmin Baek, Aaron Kleinman, David Stolp, Andrew Schwartz, Rishi Gupta, Jennifer Laaser, Inna Zakharevich, Neil Chua, Jonathan Lowd, Simon Rubinsteinsalze, Joshua Batson, Jimmy Jia, Jichao Qian, Dmitry Taubinsky, David Kaplan, Erica Wilson, Kai Dai, Julian Kolev, Jonathan Xiong, Stephen Guo.

Go to any large college and look at the graduate departments in engineering, math, and sciences. At least half of the students will be foreign (I'm speaking from experience having spent a fair amount of time in several colleges and universities).

I also teach science at a two-year college. Virtually none of my students (high school graduates all) have any competency in even simple grade-school mathematics.

My wife and I are planning to homeschool are children (currently toddlers).

The dumbing down of American education I don't deny, but two demographic trends are also potent.

First, the people who are in America are only those who were able to--and especially among Asians there has been a systematic tendency that the dumb ones couldn't get here. So the ones that are here are disproportionately professionals.
And another issue is the fact that post-secondary education is now practically the norm in America--even among groups which do not hold education up as a primary cultural value. I doubt that remedial English/Math would exist outside that context.

The article notes that there are an awful lot of people in Asia; when empowered by the Internet and cheap PCs the top 0.01% of their IQ bell curve inevitably constitutes a force to be reckoned with. What reason is there to suppose that American secondary education as we know it can in the long run withstand competition from the top 0.1% of Asia's bell curve acting through the Internet?

I think that a lot of the problem with American education is due to the fact that in America there is little respect for learning. In American high schools the student who excels in mathematics or science is a "nerd". The depiction in movies or on TV of a young person succeeding academically is exceeedingly rare. Only athletic accomplishments are glorified. I saw a display case in a high school a few years ago that was permanently devoted to the accomplishments of students who went into pro sports. There was no corresponding display concerning the students who became doctors, scientists, and engineers. The groups that seem to produce the most scientific talent are the same ones that have the highest respect for learning and academic achievement.

Some US kids CAN add. But they get nowhere in the math field cause of the way our graduate programs are run.

My son graduated Phi Beta Kappa from a top 10 university with both a masters and bachelors degree in theoretical (pure) math, with almost a 4.0 average. He took only very tough academic courses in math and the sciences. He got straight 800's on the GRE (perfect scores). He wanted to get a Ph.D. from a top math school.

His applications to MIT and Berkeley were rejected. Both schools admit almost only foreign students to their math Ph.D. programs. He went to Columbia.

He was one of only two US students entering the math Ph.D. program that year. There were two Russians, two Koreans, two Chinese and one Australian. After the first year the other US student had dropped out.

My son got a second masters. But when he went to take his pre dissertation examination he could not get three faculty members to show up to examine him. They just didn't care. After a year he got burned out and quit. He is now about to graduate from a top five law school and has done quite well there.

US universities have no interest in educating US citizens in mathematics. The way he was treated was extraordinarily shabby. So instead of a top mathemetician which we could use we get another lawyer.

This year I submiited a legislative proposal to the Texas Committee for Higher Education. I proposed that action begin to motivate our children to study Math and Science by converting the International Space Station, upon completion, into the premier 21st Century Institute for Higher Learning. Convert it into a Space University and fly students into space to study. Not since 1957 and the adventures of Homer Hickam of "October Sky" fame has space offered the opportunity of a generation.

I subsitute teach and when I ask "Would you like to fly and study in SPACE" the Yeahs! are screamed! It's unfortunate that budget deficits at the state level negate this plan. All to often we see the "dumbing down", (post regarding SAT analogy portion of test), rather than the creative thinking!

This year I submiited a legislative proposal to the Texas Committee for Higher Education. I proposed that action begin to motivate our children to study Math and Science by converting the International Space Station, upon completion, into the premier 21st Century Institute for Higher Learning.

It might be cheaper and more entertaining to put all the bad math and science teachers on rockets and launch them into the sun.

If your current legislative proposal doesn't catch fire, try that one.

They're professionally hungry. We no longer are.

Bingo. That's the root of the problem: a socioculturally-driven devolution of the character of the American people. That's the fundamental process at work, as opposed to immigration, H1B visas, outsourcing, etc. Those things are all effects, not causes.

American schools, and Americans in general, do not value theoretical science -- it's not "practical" enough. A lot of Americans see college as a place students should go to get a vocational education -- hamburger flipping and remedial math (so they can give people the correct change), yes -- physics or pure math, no.

When a lot of Americans say they value education, what they really mean at best is that they hope their children will graduate from high school or at least earn a G.E.D., or at worst they want their children to pass the substance-abuse course the judge mandated rather than going to jail.

Our whole system is geared towards the vision educationists had 100 years ago -- provide just enough literacy so that children will grow up to be able to follow simple directions and do repetitive tasks at some factory. Exceptional people can break out of that mold, work hard, and become truly educated. Such people are also considered a threat to the system and, as you found out, they generally do not get much praise or support.

Virtually none of my students (high school graduates all) have any competency in even simple grade-school mathematics.

My wife and I are planning to homeschool are children (currently toddlers).

What would happen if, say, The University of Phoenix Online, were to adopt a "graduate assistant" approach to online teaching at the High School level? U.Phoenix could recruit crackerjack Asian students to enter its online curriculum tuition-free and with a subsistence stipend just like graduate assistants at the college level. The stipend and the costs of each such "undergraduate assistant" could be defrayed by that assistant's support of a "Prep School of Phoenix Online" program--marketed to American parents who, like you, demand more of school than Political Correctness.
Seems to me such a system could arouse and meet eager wants on both the supply and the demand side . . .

I may end up somewhere else than America if this trend contunes. I was one of those nerds in Highschool. It's so pitiful the way learning and intelligence is disrespected, the current ghetto curtrle fad encourges this stupor also. Liberalsm is the factor, we need to get the liberals out of education.

Welcome to the world of New Math. Here in North Texas our children now get to "write" about their mathematical experiences in elementary and middle school.

Never mind that they don't know their 12 x 12 multiplication tables. Or how to do long division.

But they sure know how to write mis-spelled paragraphs telling you how hard it was to try.

A while back another poster jumped on me for saying that a glut of engineers would have a part in their unemployment (and he also claimed that engineers from other countries were not as good as home-bred engineers). It seems as though you have found where the jobs are: research. At the very least, you point out that home-bred researchers (etc.) may not be as competitive in the job market. Food for thought.

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