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.
>
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