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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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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<br><br>
<br>
At 10:20 PM 1/16/07, Nick Gier wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Greetings:<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Nick Gier<br><br>
<font size=2>"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the
application of it to human affairs."<br>
--Ralph Waldo Emerson<br><br>
"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings
who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."<br>
--Mohandas Gandhi<br><br>
"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." --Ma</font><font size=1>x Planck<br><br>
</font>Nicholas F. Gier<br>
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho<br>
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm</a><br>
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950<br>
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm</a><br><br>
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