Posted on 06/22/2009 12:40:47 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Exactly. There is a culture that says ‘I must go to Uni, the ‘course’ is secondary’, and when these teenagers fail to qualify to study a useful subject they take gender studies instead. They will be saddled with debt, but, like most people now, they live for the moment. The story of our civilisation’s collapse.
Against all conventional wisdom, I will disagree with you and say that America’s decline is also highly overrated.
The Universities and their advanced degrees are still the holy grail of education worldwide.
The kids of today may well pleasantly surprise and shock us all.
Sure, there are discouraging trends; the large number of foreigners in Phd Science programs, US patents declining relative to those of India, China, Japan, etc.
But, if a scientific 911 happens, a la Sputnik, I can see the trends changing.
The biggest problem in the West is the loss of confidence in the very sciences that made America the envy of the world.
At the risk of over-generalizing, our public schools have become obsessed with making girls equal to or superior to boys. Ask former Harvard president Lawrence Summers (current Obama advisor) about even suggesting boys are more inclined toward math and the sciences.
The said public schools are staffed with teachers certified according to NEA standards, as enforced by the various states, but few have practical mathematical/scientific experience outside the classroom. Most haven’t studied math beyond the level they are teaching. The NEA bitterly rejects any suggestion that retired mathematicians/scientists teach in our public schools.
By the time boys who might have had a natural proclivity for math/science reach high school they are turned off and disinterested in going beyond the mininal courses required to graduate.
If we want American scientists of the future to excel, we have to start by second grade to change the current teaching patterns. We have plenty of boys and girls who are perfectly capable of achieving high levels of math/science, but they need to be taught properly and encouraged in the areas where they excel naturally.
You are correct absolutely, not only on teachers but the vast armies of retired or surplus engineers who could easily help with schools.
I am always amazed when speaking occasionally with teachers to find how simplistic and deficient their knowledge and understanding of the subject matter.
IMO, the Edukashun degree is prolly one of the worst things to come out of America ever.
And, like you, I do not believe the kids are incapable of competing with any others anywhere.
In one of my old schools in the third world, if you fell behind in the math classes, you had to stay late and/or pay for remedial tutoring since you didn’t want to fall too far behind.
Funny, of the 6 Indian coders I have worked with, 4
*should* have been unemployed, one was OK and one is great.
YMMV.
“In one of my old schools in the third world, if you fell behind in the math classes, you had to stay late and/or pay for remedial tutoring since you didn’t want to fall too far behind.”
You mean like they used to do here ? ha!!! What a novel concept. Don’t you understand, it would conflict with soccer practice?
Funny when you think of it (not in a haha way) ... we pay through the nose for remedial classes at college but a 4th grader struggling with math/science (or English/history) isn’t kept after school for extra help ... it just gets cumulative till they’re 18 when it’s too late.
no, it started when America stopped manufacturing stuff — each time you or I buy a “Made In China” item, we are taking a job away from a fellow american
there’s no problem with foreigners in US PhD programs. The US has always benefitted from foreigners making this country their own. The question is — are those foreigners staying in the US or are they leaving back home?
Their GDP does not need to be anywhere near that of the US for them to be a threat. The birth rate in the cities of these countries has slowed, partly in China’s case due to the one-child policy, but the rural areas knock out kids like they did 5 centuries ago. If the riches of the cities of those countries, as well as the Western Aid thrown at those countries (both of whom have space programs), start flowing into the rural areas, many more will be living to army-join-up age, and that will more than offset the slowing birthrate in the cities (most of the populations of both those countries is rural).
So there is still plenty of population growth to be done in both. Even in the cities of India most families have at least 2 children, with enough having over 2 to keep the population above replenishment.
Contrast with the dying decadent West. Add to that the fact that neither of those Countries has spiralling teenage pregnancy rates, the divorce rates are well under a third of marriages, and the children actually have what has become a dirty word in the West......Ambition, and I see little cause for optimism.
Throw into the mix the well-noted high intelligence of Asian populations and it gets worse (for us anyway). Indians and Chinese born in Western countries seem to score much better than Whites in college exams, and seem to earn more during adult life than Whites, despite following the same cirriculum and sharing classrooms.
Relatively homogenous Nations of over a billion people do not need high wages to overpower weak, decadent dying countries whose populations have little identity and common purpose. All they need is willpower and intelligence - and the 2 major Asian powers have both in spades.
Not only loss of confidence in the sciences, but in everything. Look at the music the Western world pumps out these days, look at contempory ‘art’ (heart-baubel on a string anyone), look at the poetry and novels that are popular in the Western world. The west is a shadow of its former self, a hollow shell.
And I don’t think a new sputnik will happen, China could invent a machine that sucks entire landmasses in and adds them onto China’s East coast, and Western governments would say ‘oooooh, but I bet the carbon footprint is massive’ and plant a few trees.
NB: In the post above, ‘contempory’should read ‘contemporary’.
Some stay, others, increasingly so now, do go back, particularly since among others, IBM, MicroSoft and Nokia have research centers in India.
Should’ve been clearer, the danger to America is that we may not be producing enough scientists, as indicated by the presence of so many foreign grad students.
>>a new sputnik will happen, China
I do foresee a new Sputnik scenario.
China makes a moonshot and contrary to our expectations, does NOT bring the astronauts back, but subsequently sends more and adds to that nation’s manned presence on the Moon.
Regardless of that, even a simple manned orbit of the moon by the Chinese, or even the Indians (a lesser possibility) would spark a resurgence in the sciences.
But that may be looking at an America from the past; our elites may well decide that there’s nothing out there anyway and let the Chinese “waste” their money.
I have compared our spiking the manned space program as akin to the 15th Century Chinese Emperor recalling his gigantic fleet from the southeastern coast of Africa in 1450 or so, a mere 50 years before Columbus ventured into the Americas and Vasco Da Gama landed in Goa, India.
There is still a town in Goa named after him.
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13855374
..A web of sound
Jun 18th 2009
Websites that use the spoken word will empower the illiterate
THE internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life’s fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most websites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users being able to read and—if interactive—write. Building your own site certainly does.
Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his colleagues have devised a system based on what is known as “voice extensible markup language”, a cousin of the hypertext markup language used on conventional websites, that allows a website to be built and operated more or less by voice alone.
The “spoken web” Dr Banavar hopes to conjure into existence will be based on mobile phones, which are already proving an effective alternative to computers for obtaining information online in poor countries. As well as making voice calls, people can text one another and, if their phones are up to the job, get access to the web. Across the developing world there are a number of successful banking and money-transfer services that rely on mobile phones rather than computers.
.....What makes Dr Banavar’s approach different is that, by selecting an appropriate option with the handset, the user can add content to a voice site by recording a comment that is then made available to others. This can then be accessed as one of the “latest additions” or “most listened to” items in a spoken sub-menu. More important still, though, is that people can use a mobile phone to build their own voice sites—a process that, in trials conducted by the laboratory, even a non-expert could learn in as little as ten minutes.
The voice of the people
To build a site the user first selects a suitable template. The system then talks him through the bells and whistles he might wish to add to that template. A carpenter or autorickshaw driver, for example, can advertise his services, receive and confirm offers of work and even undertake basic commercial transactions through such a site. And the site can store offers of work when its owner is unavailable—as often happens in places where several people share a handset.
-PJ
Sorry, but I’ll take a crew of US programmers over a crew of fluent, accentless Indian programmers any day.
The thing about the US, still, is that they are willing to throw convention out the window when they’ve run out of options. They are willing to challenge assumptions that most of these ‘higher quality’ engineering students aren’t.
It results in novel approaches to problems, better work, better UI, and most assuredly, better time to market.
I guess we aren’t going to talk about the diploma mills they are running in his beloved India, and how cheating is an unpunished expectation there.
Any doubts? Go look at that tank the Indian Army came out with about a year ago. Talk about a rolling coffin. I also won’t comment on the string of rockets that never got their payloads into space in the last three years.
Three good US software engineers can do the work of 50 Indian software engineers. Learned that from personal experience.
This is more of the “US sucks” band playing as they sell their services to us.
My message back: Look pal, you hired them. You get what you manage. Can’t get results from people who aren’t willing to live in a caste system? Go back and hire your drones. Don’t pawn your inability to manage your people off on the help.
Anyone who’s ever managed a joint Indian-US software project knows that the savings in wages are offset by the delays in delivery and the lack of quality.
Oh, and I have real life stories of Indian engineers bailing on the company in India because instead of the hired car picking them up and dropping them off at the corner, a competing company offered to drop them off at the door. I’ve seen up to 40% turnover rate in a 12 person engineering team within an 18 month period.
They can’t even manage their own people.
This guy is huffing his own armpit aroma. For my money he can go back and live in the same town where they bulldozed that Oscar winner’s house down.
There’s a reason why a lot of outsourced Indian work is coming back home, and it isn’t patriotism.
One thing is that in general, US programmers can wear many hats. The day of the “heads down” programmer is over.
If you want to work for me as a “programmer”, you’d better also be able to be a business analyst, that means having the ability to interface with users and be able to get good requirements from them. A lot tends to get lost in the hand-off from the business analyst to the programmer, so I solve that problem by making sure my programmers can do both, and do them well.
Agree completely.
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