In the 1960s, it was the USSR. In the 1980s it was Japan. Now it's China.
I'm not trying to suggest that the US is fine and we shouldn't fix anything, but if you look at the world by comparing test scores and grade levels in mathematics, you're going to come to some very warped perceptions about what is important. I'm speaking as someone passionate about STEM education, who got a B.S. in mathematics.
The whole situation is warped. The USA accounts for 4% of the world population, and 40% of the top 100 universities in the world. That's fucking weird. I don't have an explanation for it. I'm just saying that the different signals we use for evaluating how good our education system is functioning are giving us radically different pieces of feedback, and our understanding needs to be correspondingly sophisticated.
There are all these narratives about how China is going to eat our lunch (like Japan in the 1980s, or the USSR in the 1960s) and while I don't feel comfortable betting on long-term US hegemony, and while I do think we should put more work into our mathematics education, I do think that looking at the world through high-school mathematics test scores is going to give you anxiety more than it's going to give you an accurate picture of what are problems really are.
To take another statistic into account, there are actually many STEM graduates in the US. What do we do with this information? How do we change our policies? It's unclear.
We lost entire industries of good paying jobs in consumer electronics and appliances to Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. It wasn’t the total eclipse people predicted—in part because our population control evangelists helped derail Japan’s development—but our shift to software and IP didn’t replace the kinds of jobs we lost.
Finance, insurance, social, and professional services will keep our GDP numbers afloat long past the point where the real economy has been surpassed. A better comparison is Britain. Once the real economy moves, most of the ancillary services do too. Banking and insurance keeps Britain going, but it’s actually kinda poor compared to America. (The US is to the UK as the UK is to Hungary or Poland.)
> To take another statistic into account, there are actually many STEM graduates in the US.
No there aren't, at least if you only count homegrown STEM graduates. USA can be a tech powerhouse thanks to brain drain, not thanks to its STEM education. USA is one of the worst in OECD.
> The USA accounts for 4% of the world population, and 40% of the top 100 universities in the world. That's fucking weird. I don't have an explanation for it. I'm just saying that the different signals we use for evaluating how good our education system is functioning are giving us radically different pieces of feedback, and our understanding needs to be correspondingly sophisticated.
What would our STEM university departments look like if the next generation of Indian and Chinese kids with good K-12 math educations decided opportunities were good enough at home that they didn’t need to leave their families behind and immigrate to America?
For those of who were around in that era and watched as the US auto industry and consumer electronics industry were devastated as their Japanese counterparts ran rings around them, Japan did eat America's lunch and with considerable gusto. Sony products were everywhere, as were Toyotas and Hondas.
Japan doesn't support your case. (Neither does China really.)
Isn't Toyota making cars in the U.S. now? Aren't iPhones proudly "designed in California"? The old factory jobs were doomed by technical change either way, so picking up the slack and looking for newly-opening opportunities (including in consumer tech) was an entirely sensible response on the U.S. side. But that requires fixing the dysfunctional K-12 public education system.
> The whole situation is warped. The USA accounts for 4% of the world population, and 40% of the top 100 universities in the world. That's fucking weird.
No it isn’t. The best researchers want to go to the best universities and the universities are ranked on research performance. Its a feedback loop.
I'm not trying to suggest that the US is fine and we shouldn't fix anything, but if you look at the world by comparing test scores and grade levels in mathematics, you're going to come to some very warped perceptions about what is important. I'm speaking as someone passionate about STEM education, who got a B.S. in mathematics.
The whole situation is warped. The USA accounts for 4% of the world population, and 40% of the top 100 universities in the world. That's fucking weird. I don't have an explanation for it. I'm just saying that the different signals we use for evaluating how good our education system is functioning are giving us radically different pieces of feedback, and our understanding needs to be correspondingly sophisticated.
There are all these narratives about how China is going to eat our lunch (like Japan in the 1980s, or the USSR in the 1960s) and while I don't feel comfortable betting on long-term US hegemony, and while I do think we should put more work into our mathematics education, I do think that looking at the world through high-school mathematics test scores is going to give you anxiety more than it's going to give you an accurate picture of what are problems really are.
To take another statistic into account, there are actually many STEM graduates in the US. What do we do with this information? How do we change our policies? It's unclear.