On the importance of doing the math
October 23, 2008
by Robert A. Letcher, PhD
Eventually, and to the regret of many Americans, someone has to do the math. And, it appears, to the regret of many American presidential candidates, a variation of this folk “wisdom” applies to them as well. With the clock running out on the third Presidential debate, and only enough time left for one more question, the moderator finally asked a question about education in a way that led to a discussion of science education. Better late than never, I guess, because, in the end, Presidents do have to do the math policy – and the science policy, and the engineering policy, and the Education policy that prepares people to be and carry out all of those policies.
I guess that wasn’t surprising. Americans don’t like to do the math – or the science, or the engineering. For some Americans, I suspect, that is because these subjects are difficult. Years of disciplined study are required to learn how to be a good engineer, and how to do good engineering—and a person can’t learn very much science by reading labels on beer bottles lying under tables, no matter by how many points their team may have beaten the other team.
For other Americans, I suspect, that is because science and math and engineering tend to have right answers and wrong answers – and the decision of the judges (sometimes, experts; often, bosses) is almost always final, no matter how upset a person or a person’s parent “feels” about “that idiot judge’s” decision, or how extensively the judge’s decision will impact the person’s future, or are how well the judge’s decision fits the person’s theology, cosmology, or preference. Please note: the decision of the judges is more likely to be considered final in decisions regarding answers to questions, less likely with regard to questions themselves.
But, one thing Americans like even less than doing the math is being told that they aren’t doing very well at doing math. To the moderator’s credit, he mentioned America’s poor performance, noting that even though the United States spends more money than any other country in the world on education, American students fall behind many countries in standardized testing of math and science.
Unfortunately, however, the moderator did not provide specifics, thereby foregoing a possible “teachable moment”; perhaps the moderator was too genteel to confront the candidates with the details. So, here are some details:
“The scores from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment showed that U.S. 15-year-olds trailed their peers from many industrialized countries. The average science score of U.S. students lagged behind those in 16 of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world’s richest countries. The U.S. students were further behind in math, trailing counterparts in 23 countries.” [According to an article written by Maria Glod that appeared in The Washington Post on December 5, 2007 under the headline, “U.S. Teens Trail Peers Around World on Math-Science Test”]
As the article continued, “[t]he disappointing performance of U.S. teenagers in math and science on an international exam, in scores released yesterday, has sparked calls for improvement in public schools to help the country keep pace in the global economy.”
Of course, interpreting results expressed in terms of averages can be misleading. To illustrate: “the average person” is not actually a real person; and so, can never actually accomplish anything, anywhere. Furthermore, as Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell argue in “Making the Grade”, in the May 2008 issue of Nature, “[A]verage test scores tell us nothing about the distribution of students with the very best test scores.” And it is those “stars”—along with a declining number of “backyard tinkerers” like Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniac—actual people, not mathematical constructs, whose creativity, curiosity, and “vision” DO lead to breakthroughs, subject to cultural disposition and organizational tendencies I have argued elsewhere; see my essay “Comments on Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class.”
This low performance in math and science has been accompanied by an even lower ranking among countries of the world in health care. According to the World Health Organization the United States was ranked 37th in a 1997 listing, which was the most recent I could find.
For comparison, France—the country who gave the US “liberty fries”—finished first; Great Britain, 19th; Costa Rica, 36th; Slovenia, 38th; and, to the great embarrassment of nine US Presidents (seven rolling over in their graves, with two more still alive and rolling over), Cuba, 39th.
Somehow, Americans seem able to insulate themselves from pondering implications of ranking so poorly, often by screaming all the louder, “we’re number one!” – as if having a football team about which one could scream such blather were all that was required to make it so. (Such screaming by Britain’s infamous “football hooligans” hasn’t prevented the British Empire from being tossed into history’s dustbin.) When screaming isn’t enough, a few Americans can tacitly resort to a version of “the tragedy of the commons” and simply go to business school, manage money instead of developing technological breakthroughs, get paid better—and leave the complexities of math and science for someone else to learn. This approach offers a further advantage of improving a person’s prospects of becoming a boss and so, a judge whose decisions about what is right usually end up being final (see above!). Unfortunately, as British portfolio managers discovered in the early 20th century discovered the hard way that strategy usually provides only temporary relief—and from the country’s point of view, only for a few portfolio managers.
For some Americans, screaming about football teams still not enough. Some of them find comfort in deities, such as the one that supposedly placed Earth at the center of the universe for the first 1500 years of the common era. That’s a pretty big mistake for a perfect and all-knowing deity to make, I think. It makes me wonder what other mistakes that deity might have persuaded all those Americans studying their beer bottle labels under tables to believe (like “creative design” is a “theory”, when it barely qualifies as a hunch and as-practiced is merely an assertion) and to not-believe (like evolution is not-correct). And, flat-Earth cosmology confounds and complicates the already difficult task of teaching science.
My purpose here is not to dump on beer drinkers who’ve had a few too many, particularly since I have done more than my own share of worshipping the porcelain god. Rather, I want to argue that, in effect, successful reification isn’t necessarily the same as success. That is, “everyone’s saying it’s so” doesn’t always “make it so”. Nor does “everyone’s saying it’s so” LOUDER. Eventually, as I wrote at the beginning of this essay, someone has to do the math.
In an era dominated by international finance and global capitalism, and regulated by nationally-identified and, therefore (according to General Systems Theory), insufficiently complex regulators, what matters—and all that matters—is THAT a country is #1. I wish I could say, “It ain’t so.” But I can’t. No one can. The only people who can say, “It is so.” are those at the top of the heap, who have worked hard enough, and creatively enough, and collectively enough to occupy (still, though only contingently) with the US the place that the US had grown accustomed to occupying alone (back when this country did the math, and the science, and the engineering—and the exploiting: of Native Peoples, natural resources, and imperialist objectives).
To put this all into perspective, let me end with a personal anecdote. Back in 1971, I studied engineering at an “Institute of Technology”. I graduated with a 3.19 grade point average. For several years, I wondered what that grade point meant. About 15 years later, I had opportunity to raise this question to a highly accomplished professor of engineering; indeed, he was listed in “Who’s who?” in his field of engineering. He told me that when he had started to teach (at a large mid-western state university) in 1956, the average grade point average was about 2.5. (I began to breathe a bit easier.) He continued, saying that the average grade point average for engineers at his school for the year I graduated was 2.85; (I began to feel better about myself.) He finished by telling me that the average grade point average for that then current term was 3.5—quickly adding: “and the students aren’t nearly as good as they used to be,”
There are many possible explanations for the trend he described, and I readily acknowledge that those explanations might have been supplanted since by still other, different explanations. Furthermore, it’s not clear that the hill the US used to occupy the top of hasn’t itself changed from below. Climate change may require different kinds of solutions, grounded in different skills and different knowledges. Staying on top might require relocating to a different hill, even if it couldn’t be clear before beginning to move how far up the new hill the old skills and knowledges might sustain us.
There are only a few things I am sure of. One is: we can’t stay where we are, whether on a hill or under a table. Another is: we’ll have to learn our collective way from where we are to where we hope to be. And: the challenge is so great that we need all of us working hard together, learning how to do so when old ways won’t work, to contribute to the effort. To me, that makes education crucial to this country’s future. What will be required to avoid losing? If people detect either that they are no longer being challenged by their work, or if they find themselves reading beer bottle labels under tables, then I would suspect that he country is on its way to History’s Great Dustbin.
Comments
5 Comments »
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Dr. Letcher,
A truly fascinating article, thank you. I am deeply engaged in efforts to improve literacy comprehension, working with several groups involved with cradle to grave, lifelong learning efforts. As you know, our literacy rates are well below that of other countries as well, and it occurs that our generally low literacy comprehension has a direct correlation to low math and science scores as well. What would be your opinion on this?
Larry –thanks for your comment!…I didn’t notice it until yesterday, and i’ve been busy since, including Obama canvassing, Before i get to your question, i would like to say that i was struck by your choice of “fascinating” to describe my article. i wonder whether you could elaborate—and not just for me, but for all of us who write for WE. What do you mean by “fascinating”? What specifically did i do in the article that left you feeling that way? Maybe even write an entire article; such as “What makes an article “fascinate me [Larry] and how you other writers could go about making your articles fascinate me [Larry] more, and more often.”
As for life-long learning, that sounds good to me., But many–perhaps most–people need reason to hope it will make a difference for them financially. That means we need to create a new kind of economy. Did you happen to see my essay in the old WE: “Hello Charlie Rose staffer”? It’s at
http://www.mytown.ca/ev.php?URL_ID=122911&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201&reload=1225133868
In it, i wrote about social constraints on learning. Let me know if any of it addresses your question.
bob letcher
Bob- You’ve asked a kind of beauty and the beholder question. What I find fascinating others may not. In any event, what fascinates me in an article is its ability to teach me something new.
Unfortunately, what is offered in most media these days is only so much junk food for the mind. Beyond the celebrity news and the up to the minute sports scores, media in general seems to scratch the surface when it comes to the really important aspects of our lives, including who is running the country, and how their policies affect Americans each day.
Certainly my involvement with literacy made me suspect that other areas of learning were being ignored- but your article not only confirmed those suspicions, it motivated me to learn more about the lack of emphasis on math and science. Whenever a writer motivates me to press further in understanding an issue, they have done me a great favor, because broader insight into an issue is where I find the tools to confidently address that issue.
There are numerous articles, both in print and on the internet, which tend to generate more heat than light. Your article illuminated me in a way that is all too rare these days; not only did it motivate me to learn more, but to re-evaluate my own writing. That is always a good thing, because the furthering of knowledge always leads to positive growth.
Larry
Larry–thanks for your kind words… I had good teachers.
In my way of understanding humans living, knowledge gives answers, but wisdom comes from questions. I try to provoke questions, in a world where authority figures SAY “think outside the box” but MEAN “think inside my box”. No wonder: as taking the SAY part literally leads to “question authority”.
Bob
Bob-
While we’re all sitting around transfixed in fascination, I’ll toss the hat into the ring and admit a little of it myself. Your paragraph illustrating the engineering students declining in quality while their grade point averages rose over the years, gives me an idea. I’ll be teaching cultural anthropology next Spring at the Central Texas College, Gatesville PRISON campus. I’ll let you know if all our brigher students have been squirreled away in such places….
Maybe they forgot it was authority figures counseling them to think outside the box.
But… remind me!
(And…. maybe they don’t vote, either, having earned the life-long label, “felon.”)
Tom DeLay and Sarah in 2012? Na-a-a-a-ah.
G