[Vision2020] Foreigners in Math, Science, and Engineering

[Jerry Weitz]

Hi Nick,  Chinese engineers are not close to the quality of American 
trained engineers as of yet.  However, China is short-circiuting the 
process as Stanford U did when it started.  It is buying whole 
universities/ setup's etc.  My oldest son is working on a $500,000,000 
project that transfers a whole school to a country flush with dollars.

In the meantime, our best colleges of engineering  are finding applicants 
with great test scores who are floundering in engineering.  Folks from MIT, 
even UI and WSU are seeking the answer to why this is occuring.  They have 
collectively come to the conclusion and are recommending hands on-- 
learning by doing  at K-12 as the answer.  At MIT I am told by one of the 
folks who works in admisssions,  that they will take a farm boy with hands 
on experience over a student that has no experience.

So, Dewey was correct and the present k-12 is not working well.  It is not 
a matter of the simple call for money.  With MSD at 168 days of 
instruction, there is no time for a traditional university lab setting.  No 
university would conduct chem lab the way MSD or most others do.  Ideally, 
the school year would be 200-220 days.  That does not mean sitting in a 
classroom.  Afternoons could be in lab, art, music, skills training, 
etc.  Classroom teachers would be well served since prep time would be 
greater. I know of a college prep all girls school in Seattle that builds a 
complete airplane each year and has outstanding SAT's with an average from 
1410-1450 consistently.  In dental education, we are seeing great academic 
scores with little correlation to clinical skill at graduation.  Manual 
dexterity is the only positive correlation.  Dental Schools are now 
starting to recommend industrial arts prerequisties in such activities as 
metal  working, machining, wood crafts, art, etc.  jerry


At 10:20 PM 1/16/07, Nick Gier wrote:
>Greetings:
>
>It is a song of praise that I note that Chinese, Indians, and Russians, 
>mainly because of their solid credentials, are taking positions in our 
>universities that could be occupied by Americans, if they received enough 
>math and science in our schools and if they worked hard enough to earn 
>PhDs in these fields.
>
>Correctly for population, the Chinese graduate ten times more engineers 
>than we do.  We cannot compete unless we transform our educational systems 
>and our increasingly anti-intellectual culture.
>
>Nick Gier
>
>"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to human 
>affairs."
>--Ralph Waldo Emerson
>
>"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
>represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
>  --Mohandas Gandhi
>
>"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
>discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
>by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
>interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
>life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
>art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
>--Max Planck
>
>Nicholas F. Gier
>Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
>1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
>http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
>208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
>President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
>http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm
>
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