The Crisis in Technical Education
with
Some Ideas on How to Fix It


techEd@ccjj.info

A year ago, I read Chris Mooney's "The Republican War On Science".  It was a fun book, and the conservatives are guilty of distorting scientific debate in many ways, but in my review of Ann Coulter's Godless, I quote where she makes a pretty good case for the fact that liberals are guilty of distorting and stifling scientific inquiry in some areas too.
    Where I disagree with Chris Mooney is that I don't think that voting for Democrats in and of itself will fix the core problem as I see it, which is that most of the population is profoundly technically illiterate.  The only thing I have heard from Democrats regarding schools is they want to basically throw more money at them, but keep them basically as they are.  Our educational system is failing to prepare people to live in a society that must become, if our standard of living is to be maintained without catastrophic environmental harm, increasingly technological.
    Most people, when they discuss technical education, think that the purpose of technical education is to produce teachers, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.  This is wrong.  We are in a society where everybody gets to vote, everybody makes daily decisions as a consumer, many people make important technical decisions as investors, and most people aren't well informed enough to make good decisions in these spheres.
    Most people deal with technology by delegating decisions to specialists.  But by law they have the right to ignore the specialists.
     A lot of academics feel that whoever has the most advanced and relevant degree should be the party that decides the issue, and the rest of society should just follow their lead without question.  Expecting people to accept anything without question is a lot to ask, not to mention completely in conflict with the ideals of democracy.
     Furthermore, there is always disagreement among experts.  Even when there is overwhelming consensus on an issue among the scientific community, there is always some tenured goofball in a university somewhere who will disagree, and then those people who, for whatever reason (such as economic interest or political/religious fashion), want to ignore that consensus can then claim that there is no consensus and believe whatever it suits them to believe.
Nature of the Existing Educational System

     I am an engineer, and the educational system suited my interests well.  But I could see how it was turning off most people.
    Technical education in elementary school consisted mostly of arithmetic.  Not math, arithmetic.  It was boring and repetitive and lifeless and dull.  It only got fun when we started having competitions at it around 4th grade and I found out I was good at it.  I didn't get good at it because I liked it, I got to like it because I was good at it.  Where does this leave the 50% of the students who were below average?
     There wasn't a lot of science in elementary school.  There was some, but not much.  I think the feeling was that that would have to wait until we had the math for it.
     Science really came in full force in high school.  For the most part, engineering did not.  They now have computer classes in high school, which weren't there when I was around, so I can't comment on them.

     This was fine for me, because I was an honors student.  I spent a tremendous amount of my spare time reading books on science, books on technology, and science fiction when I was growing up.  I was also building flying model planes and flying model rockets and all sorts of contraptions.  Furthermore, it was clear from a very young age that I wanted to be a technical person.  On top of that, my father was an engineer and would talk to me about what he did.
     But when I look at this education and ask myself, what would it have done for me without all this supplemental activity of mine on the side, and had I not been planning for technical future?  Would I have seen any relevance in the math I was learning?  Or the science for that matter?  The answer is plainly no.  And that is the answer I see reflected in the faces of most of the population when someone talks about technology.
Teaching Technology

    The idea is that you have to know arithmetic to be able to handle math, you have to know math to be able to handle science, and you have to know science to be able to handle technology.  And this idea is false.  Yes, to do groundbreaking research in technology you need to be good and science and math, but most people can learn a lot about technology with neither, just using common sense.
     And for someone who has no plans to do groundbreaking research of any kind, that is, most of the population, learning how things work is, unlike pure math or science, let alone arithmetic, potentially quite interesting.
     Imagine if we taught gym the way we teach technical subjects.  In K-12, students would do nothing but the basic movements, as calisthenics.  Nothing would be done as coordinated teams and there would be no sports, on the belief that you weren't ready for sports until you had all the basic movements down.  The focus would be on a few athletes who would actually do sports in college or in grad school to become professional athletes.  Everyone else would be made to feel they had failed out of gym.  I would predict that with such a program, most students would hate gym, and in fact hardly anyone would watch professional sports as adults.  And that's what our current technical education program is doing to most people.
     So we come to the million dollar puzzle: I think most people would be interested to know how the technology around them works, it is in society's overwhelming interest to have voters, consumers, and investors who know how things work, so why isn't K-12 teaching it to everybody, instead of nobody?
A Technical Minor

    Another thing that wasn't present in either of the universities I was at was the concept of a technical minor.  It might be perfectly appropriate for someone majoring in, say, business or economics or law to want to get a minor in some technical discipline, or even in technology in general.  This might already be done at teaching colleges (both the schools I went to were research institutions).
How Important is Arithmetic?

    We teach our elementary school students arithmetic at great cost.  Yes, they learn how to add, subtract, multiply, and if they're lucky, divide, with pencil and paper, but in the process of acquiring these skills they are taught at a young age that numbers are the most boring thing on the face of the Earth!
    I remember taking a psychology class where they were talking about an experiment some psychologists were doing.  They wanted to inflict pain on the subjects, but ethically they weren't allowed to.  What these psychologists chose to do, the worst punishment they could think of to inflict on their subjects that would be within ethical boundaries, was to make them tally up long columns of numbers.
    Math is useful.  If you can teach someone math and how it is useful, they are then much more motivated to learn arithmetic, if it's really even necessary to learn arithmetic.   We have calculators, and they're really, really cheap.  You can get watches that have calculators built into them.  Cheap.
     I know a lot of math involving sines, cosines, tangents, logarithms, and hypergeometric sines and cosines.  I know how these things are useful.  I never learned how to calculate any of them on a piece of paper.  If I sat down with it for a weekend, I could probably figure some of it out, I had a friend of mine do that, but I never had the time.  I just use a calculator.  It's not the end of the world.
     I think it might be good to teach people how to guestimate numbers, if that's possible without learning all the details necessary to calculate things exactly.  For example, I can guestimate the sine of an angle between 0 and 90 degrees though, as I have said, I have no idea how to calculate a sine on paper.  As it is, a lot of people have to add everything up exactly to know the result of an addition, they can't guestimate and just look at a number and feel if it's reasonable.  If I had to limit myself to only one of those two skills, guestimation in my head or precise arithmetic with pencil and paper, I would say guestimation in my head is more valuable.  If I've got room to write on a piece of paper, I've got room for a calculator.