{"id":2815,"date":"2008-08-06T08:42:11","date_gmt":"2008-08-06T08:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/06\/selfesteem-is-not-the-problem\/"},"modified":"2008-08-06T08:42:11","modified_gmt":"2008-08-06T08:42:11","slug":"selfesteem-is-not-the-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/06\/selfesteem-is-not-the-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-Esteem Is Not the Problem With Science Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Arts & Letters Daily<\/a> sent me to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/cite> with the headline How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science<\/a>. “Hey,” I thought, “Good to see this issue getting some more attention.” And, indeed, the article starts off well enough, with a decent statement of the problems in science education:<\/p>\n

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Back in 2003, the National Science Board issued a report that noted steep declines in “graduate enrollments of U.S. citizens and permanent residents” in the sciences. The explanation? “Declining federal support for research sends negative signals to interested students.” That seems unlikely, in that the alleged decline hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of students from all around the world for our country’s graduate programs.<\/p>\n

The precipitous drop in American science students has been visible for years. In 1998 the House released a national science-policy report, “Unlocking Our Future,” that fussily described “a serious incongruity between the perceived utility of a degree in science and engineering by potential students and the present and future need for those with training.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sadly, though, the author is from the right-wing National Association of Scholars, so the article goes completely off the rails soon after that. The problem, you see, is that math and science are hard, and our students are coddled from an early age, and thus don’t have the old-fashioned gumption to tackle math and science:<\/p>\n

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The antiscience agenda is visible as early as kindergarten, with its infantile versions of the diversity agenda and its early budding of self-esteem lessons. But it complicates and propagates all the way up through grade school and high school. In college it often drops the mask of diffuse benevolence and hardens into a fascination with “identity.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You know what would really help science education? If quasi-official academic journals like the Chronicle<\/cite> would start thinking about it as more than another venue for warmed-over culture-wars horseshit. That’d be an excellent start.<\/p>\n

Of course, that might require people to engage with the actual problems of science education. The solution is straightforward, but unpopular.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I agree that students are being turned off from science, but the problem isn’t “self-esteem” or “identity”– the problem is bad teaching at the early levels. And that comes about because many of the people who go into teaching are not comfortable with math and science, and that discomfort comes through. They do a lousy job presenting math and science to students, and it turns those students off<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The problem is, people who are actually good with math and science can make five times the money with one fifth the hassle by doing something other than teaching science to kids. If we want to improve the quality of science students in this country, we need to improve the quality of science teachers, and that’s going to cost money– money for training better teachers, and money to make teaching a more attractive option to them.<\/p>\n

Of course, any solution that costs money is Right Out, especially for jackass right-wing pundits, so instead we get this twaddle about character and attitude and spiritual renewal. Which, coincidentally, just happens<\/strong> to involve discarding a bunch of progressive concerns about race and gender that conservatives find distasteful.<\/p>\n

(Which is not to say that jackass liberal pundits have vastly better ideas– it’s just that they haven’t written any stupid columns in the Chronicle<\/cite> that caught my attention recently.)<\/p>\n

There are a few things that could be done to improve the situation without a huge infusion of cash, though, mostly having to do with working conditions. As regular readers of this blog have heard a zillion times, my father taught sixth grade for thirty-odd years in a public school, and his experience has shaped a lot of my opinions about education issues. It also kept me from even considering the idea of teaching below the college level.<\/p>\n

It’s not just the money– my salary as a first-year assistant professor was not vastly better than what they pay high school physics teachers in this state. There’s all the other stuff that goes along with public school teaching. There is no campus committee assignment I could draw that is anywhere near as unpleasant as having to ride herd over a cafeteria full of hormonal teenagers. Especially given the way discipline issues tend to be handled (or, rather, not handled) these days.<\/p>\n

There are things that could be done to improve the working environment to make things more pleasant for teachers, starting on the discipline side. A depressing amount of bullying and harassment are tolerated because it’s easier to slap the kids on the wrist and send them back to class than to remove them from the classroom and deal with their parents. Get the worst of the kids out of the schools, and things will improve for students and teachers alike.<\/p>\n

But, in the end, it comes down to money, even on the working-conditions side (reducing class sizes is another big issue): teachers are not paid enough for the education they require. Particularly in the sciences– if you’re good at science, and interested in teaching, you’re better off going to a Ph.D. program than an MAT program. It won’t cost you anything, and even if you don’t make it in the academic job market, you’ll be qualified for jobs that pay a whole lot better than teaching.<\/p>\n

That’s the core of the problem. We’re raising students who are bad at science because we have teachers who are bad at science, because we aren’t willing to do what it takes to get people with strong science backgrounds into education. And, of course, we tolerate this because of the “math is hard” culture of innumeracy that I ranted about last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arts & Letters Daily sent me to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the headline How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science. “Hey,” I thought, “Good to see this issue getting some more attention.” And, indeed, the article starts off well enough, with a decent statement of the problems in science… Continue reading Self-Esteem Is Not the Problem With Science Education<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,42,28,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-policy","category-politics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}