Ken
a couple of Big Names from some Education Foundation were on Charlie
Rose last night and *said* they had talked to the VP, & felt that the P
was 'on-side' with their call for much moola to support making
education in science & maths central & improving education all across
the USA. They were so keen, & so *for* the administration's & the rest
of the government's 'support'. I thought they were a little sweet &
naive myself, given Dubya also still called for no stem-cell research,
& that when they said 'the people' will back the Pres, I remembered
that many who voted for him want their kids taught creationism....
Or all the drop-outs who don't vote anyway....
Doug
On 1-Feb-06, at 7:53 AM, Ken Wolman wrote:
> Some of us, the older farts, may remember the horror with which the US
> received news that Russia had put a manned space vehicle up there.
> Yuri
> Gagarin? Laika the dog? Hey, Yuri may have volunteered, but did
> someone ask the poor mutt? Even as a semi-conscious high school
> student
> I remember all the soul searching and breast beating: how could this
> nation of vodka-swilling outdoor-plumbing using Commies beat the
> gin-swilling indoor-plumbing using ChristAlmighty U.S.? In fairness I
> do not remember any search for the guilty a la the Rosenberg atomic
> witch hunt just because the Russians got into space first. Maybe
> that's
> the part where I just fell asleep.
>
> Anyway, there was a great scream-and-yell about how perfectly wretched
> the US public schools were. Books appeared about America's
> anti-intellectualism (odd because the most anti-intellectual people
> I've
> met are engineers), its inability to produce world-class mathematicians
> and scientists of various types, about how American schools were geared
> more to "life adjustment" and sports curricula than to doing real work.
> The culture itself came under attack; there were examinations of social
> issues, artistic culture, etc. David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd had
> appeared in 1953, but I actually read it and I don't suppose I been the
> same since. I was able to absorb a lot more then than I can now.
> Columnists like Marya Mannes did some great pointed ranting about the
> state of the general culture that could produce not a barbaric yawp but
> a Neanderthal yawn when it came to matters of political, cultural and
> scientific survival: Maureen Dowd is Mannes' inheritor but Mannes could
> have written Dowd off the page.
>
> Almost most 50 years later all this remains valid criticism. And
> nothing appears to have changed. The school systems that grew or
> changed during that generation could produce G. W. Bush, Dick Cheney.
> I
> heard the science and math part of the Incoronated Fraud's speech last
> night and I don't think he was wrong--just that it's very hard to
> figure
> out what we want to do with our students or ourselves or why the
> situation of second-ratedness continues. During my tenure at Sarnoff I
> got the impression that most of the heavy scientific lifting was done
> by
> graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology. I gather that the men
> and women who apply there list MIT as their safety school. It's the
> Global Economy, folks...
>
> Me, I have work to do.
>
> Ken
> -----------------------------
> Ken Wolman
> Miercom
> www.mier.com
> 609-490-0200, ext. *8-14
>
>> Teach our kids math, blah, and science. Blah, blah. Creative
>> minds supported. Tax credits for all. Blah. Innovation, yea!
>> No behind left unchilded. Blah, blah, blah. Abstinence, rah.
>>
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
it's Sappho I said, on the radio
Daphne Marlatt
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