Well there isn’t a lack of opportunities for people with science and math degrees. So the OP is simply incorrect.
But someone mentioned nursing so I made an aside about nursing. Though nursing is a science degree.
IT is super-specialized. That’s part of the thing with IT. There are always lots of jobs but they are also always being competed for. The nature of IT is that there is a high turnover rate as IT workers tend to work on contract quite a bit. But yes, there are IT jobs.
Well, you can’t depend that a job in a highly specialized field won’t require you to move somewhere.
Yes, you have to have a practical discipline. This is often lost on people who are about to graduate college and people who have recently graduated college. They are often very bitter about the fact that their intellectual degree isn’t perfectly applicable to the real job market and that they have to do some basic training beyond the degree they just spent 4-6 or 8 years acquiring.
I’m sorry if the whole ‘praxis’ level of the reality construct is making it difficult for you to parse your ideological abstractions.
I’ll give you a hint: You have to educate the entire populace, the entire population of children need teachers, to have a higher teacher/student ratio you need to devote far more human capital to the job than the public school system devotes. Small class sizes simply isn’t a high priority in public education.
Right, the person prepared with critical thinking skills but is light on facts can learn the facts very quickly as opposed to the person who is heavy on facts but light on critical thinking.
Could you please stop going on posting sprees like that? It’s irritating to read, when typically you expect the next post to be made by a different person. Use the little quotation marks button on the bottom right in between the “quote” and quick reply button to quote multiple posts in the one you want to reply to, instead of padding your post count.
But I don’t see how you teach “critical thinking skills” of this kind divorced from an environment of using those skills to find, interpret, and make use of facts. Yes, it’s great if you guide students to use and develop their own critical thinking skills to develop a well-founded argument about why the Civil War happened. It’s not great if you emphasize “critical thinking” to the degree that someone doesn’t know what the Fugitive Slave Act, Fort Sumter, and tariffs are after passing an American History class. You can’t critically think about a topic without knowing the facts to think about first; the person who is “light on facts” has already lost the game. Critical thinking as divorced from research and an understanding of how facts relate to arguments is nothing but bickering, and to teach it by itself only produces the type of people who are absolutely confident in their devotion to untrue beliefs, because they can yell loudly or invoke all-purpose defense mechanisms about having a right to their opinion.
So your claim that “public education by definition cannot cater to individuals” means that we currently don’t or won’t devote enough funds, not that there is something about public education that “by definition” can’t have sufficient funding levels. But if it’s just *won’t *or *don’t *that is by no means a proper use of “by definition”.
Re: the public school thing:
The problem, in my opinion, is that we have this idea that, for each student to be given individual attention, that means a human teacher has to give it. I think we could pull it off with computers doing the teaching the facts, so that the human teacher can focus more on the more nebulous concepts.
Basically, the teacher would be able to focus on teaching you HOW to learn. After you were far enough along, you wouldn’t even really need the teacher, so they could focus on the other students that did still need help.
When I was in 5th and 6th grade, we had a “computer lab” where we went and used software to teach us math at our own pace. The program would test our knowledge, and if we didn’t get every question right, it would go into an interactive lesson on the subject, and then would retest. I always thought that was going to be the way of the future.
Obviously, this would only work in the more traditional classes. You’d still need people to get together to learn how to interact socially, as most homeschoolers that I have met seem to be behind the curve socially (though they catch up quickly in college or work.)
Give a person a Google search, and he has one set of facts today. Teach a person to do a Google search, and he has facts for a lifetime.
But if we do better, we will have more of a pool for the math and science oriented jobs we need. I’m in contact with a lot of professors and a lot of grad students in my section of electrical and computer engineering, and only a tiny fraction are US born. I work at a well known high tech company. A bunch of us just changed buildings, and are more or less isolated. Of about 20 people at all levels of education, 2 are US born. This is not anti-immigration in the least, but I think it would be nice to get some of the best US born people into my profession, which does pay pretty well.
To be replaced by? Textbooks, for science at least, started being written when papers became too specialized for the average student to read. Where this is not true, for instance in many lit classes and even some philosophy classes, you don’t read textbooks, you read original source material. We might change the delivery mechanism, but we will still have textbooks.
That’s part of the equation. But you can have all the information in the world at your fingertips and still be an idiot. This brings up the image of Jenny McCarthy who proudly proclaimed that she graduated from the university of google as a defense against accusations of… well, that she has no clue what she’s talking about in regards to anti-vax BS. People aren’t that good at evaluating the quality of sources, how to seperate the good from the bad, and what conclusions to draw from that information. Increasingly we will have any information available to us at any time - but how many people can use it well?
Businesses like people who can perform specific tasks for them. They hire people to do a particular job. And honestly unless you are going to do something like design arcane trading or economics models, there isn’t really a lot of “math” in business beyond some basic addition and subtraction.
Really, with the internet, it seems to me that there is no excuse for going to school, studying a major that no one is hiring for and then complaining about not being able to find a job after the fact.
I do that when I realize I am going to reply to more than one post before I do it.
But what you are essentially describing is someone who doesn’t have critical thinking skills. If they lack the ability to parse those facts then they don’t have the critical thinking skills. Basically you can make critical thinking skills primary and the absorption of facts will come naturally. You can make facts primary and hte critical thinking does not come naturally. For instance, if I teach you about the runaway slave act, and I teach you not just that this was a law that was passed, but explain the mentality of the people making laws such as the runaway slave act, then you require the person to think about it. You then challenge any uncritical assumptions that they come to. By engaging their critical faculties you get them to think about the facts themselves. They have to look into the facts in order to support their argument, and as such they memorize it automatically. As opposed to rote memorization which doesn’t engage the critical faculties at all.
Sure.
Exactly. A big part of critical thinking skills is the ability to do quality research.
Yes. That is true, but your demographic is skewed. Math and Science skills need more emphasis, no doubt about it, but the East Asian cultures that are pumping out Engineers these days tend to over-emphasize them. But I think we are in agreement that if primary education did better with Math and Science education, then it would be better for the populace as a whole. It would make us more competitive for the jobs you are talking about, and it would also give the general populace a better educational baseline with which to support those technical jobs.
I didn’t say we shouldn’t produce texts that distill the information for the students. I said we shouldn’t produce TEXTBOOKS. There is plenty of public information available on the internet to teach anatomy for instance. All without resorting to scientific journals. Teaching anatomy is one of those places where wikipedia is the right tool for the job. Understanding the range of motion for the Flexor Carpi Ulnaris does not require an expensive textbook.
It’s not the distilled information I object to. It is the limited textual format required by paper size and page counts that limits how much information can go into the book, and the sheer weight of the books, that I have a problem with. Simply put expecting a 13 year old to carry around 30 lbs of books on their back is kind of unfair, and at this point we have the technology where they shouldn’t have to. If McGraw-Hill wanted to publish their information in a web format and license the product to schools, that would be fine. No more fines for writing in the margins. Every student could have a notepad account where they can scrawl all over the website if they like. It would be considerably cheaper, as you could charge less expensive licenses for the accounts, and provide paired down laptops that have security software so that students cannot browse beyond sanctioned materials on that laptop.
Dehumanized, an in-depth article by Harper’s Mark Slouka, suggests that society wants to keep turning out math and science grads regardless of whether the economy needs more of them.
One reason - of course - is that the private sector is deeply prejudiced in favor of people who deal in quantifiable data. This has shaped our institutions - educational and public ones too - in ways that are not easily adaptable to changing needs.
Doesn’t seem to be too much support for that one. The reality is as Voyager and others have pointed out, that people are coming to America to take technical jobs with their math and science educations. So clearly there IS a need for people with these skills. If a math and science grad failed to prepare themselves for the exigencies of a real marketplace, that’s hardly a strike against math and science in general.
But as I said before, we could do much better in terms of math and science in High School. I am quite good at math actually, always have been. Didn’t do well in higher maths because the way the teacher taught it just pushed me away. It just didn’t work. I didn’t get it because the rote memorization didn’t work for me. I need to understand it, to grok its purpose to understand it. But I can actually do complex calculations in my head. Got all the way through Algebra 1 that way.
Here’s a list of starting and median salaries of specific majors.
Edit: Oops, someone already posted something similar.
I might counter that the way the subjects are taught is just as important to society - and reflects the kind of minds society wants (if not needs). You focus on outcomes and results and what do you get? Rote memorizers, i-dotters and t-crossers, and good organization men.
Thinking outside the box, thinking critically, and solving problems in new ways are great buzzwords for organizations. But the reality is not nearly so marketable. Status quo thinking is what keeps the lights on.
Organization is a critical thinking skill. I disagree that our system produces good organizers. Most people cannot read a spreadsheet (Math skill) organize a taxonomy (math skill) or read statistics (math skill).
What is marketable for a corporation and what is useful cognitively are two separate issues.
You betcha. But what we get is what we’re willing to pay for - not necessarily what we need.
BTW, organization men have to do with organizations - large corporatist entities - not necessarily with being organized. But there I go invoking soft science again.
Fair point.
So are you arguing that being an organization man is hindered by good critical thinking skills?