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The article lost me with the claim that there’s some sort of “push to de-emphasize STEM.” As near as I can tell, they think this is something recent, but in my

The article lost me with the claim that there’s some sort of “push to de-emphasize STEM.” As near as I can tell, they think this is something recent, but in my experience it started in the 1970s and the emphasis on increasing emphasis on STEM since the mid-2000s is the course correction that’s taking place now.

Ancalagon 5y ago
I agree with this. STEM is being shouted from the rooftops from just about every major employer in the US I can think of at this point.
dfmooreqqq 5y ago
Me too. If anything STEM is gaining steam.
mooreds 5y ago
Here was a thread that this article was posted in response to: https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1389456546753437699 https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1389456546753437699 "In the name of “equity”, California DOE’s 2021 Mathematics Framework attacks the idea of gifted students and eliminates opportunities for accelerated math. - no grouping students by ability - no Algebra for 8th graders - no Calculus for high schoolers https://cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ "
- swiley 5y ago
  What an idiotic thing to do. This will absolutely hurt women and underprivileged people far more than privileged men, and it will result in a lot gifted people refusing to cooperate.
  - nocommentguy 5y ago
    At some point hanlon’s razor starts getting dull. Follow the money
  - Pulcinella 5y ago
    Lol you should actually read the thread and replies. It may calm some of your fears. The author does a whole lot of backpedaling after being called out for the fact that the DOE’s proposal does not, in fact, eliminate HS calculus. Edit: The “lol” wasn’t directed at you by the way. I found it funny that the author of that thread was making a big deal about “the elimination of HS Calculus” and then immediately followed it up with a bunch of hemming and hawing about how that wasn’t true.
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      > I found it funny that the author of that thread was making a big deal about “the elimination of HS Calculus” and then immediately followed it up with a bunch of hemming and hawing about how that wasn’t true. From what I've gathered in the thread, the actual official recommendations appears to be simultaneously recommending and not recommending the elimination of HS Calculus.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Algebra is another story but if you ask university math faculty their opinions of high school AP "Calculus" you might want to sit down first.
  - ardit33 5y ago
    whats wrong with it? My AP Calc in high school classes (two semesters) in Virgina (Halifax Country) was just as good as Calc 1 in college. I wished I had skipped it. Calc 2 was the class that I found challenging. I also in high school, I took Pascal as a learning to program/into class. I college I learned Ada, and it was a breeze due to my high school. I feel thankful to my last year in public school in middle of no where, rural VA, as it gave me great education/foundation that I did really well in college. I feel bad, as now Virginia is doing the same crap with math in the name of equity. Dumbing things down to the least common denominator is terrible, especially for smart/capable immigrants like I was. We don't have the luxury of private schools, and public schools are starting to pull the rug out as well. It is awful
  - fastball 5y ago
    So the solution to poor instruction is to drop it? Math is a useful skill for everyone, including calculus. Not everybody goes to university, so we should teach it in HS.
    - intergalplan 5y ago
      Approaching 40. Haven't ever needed calculus (or Trig) for anything. Sometimes I make an effort to pick math back up just because I feel like I ought to, but it'd be so purely a hobby with no practical use that I have a hard time keeping at it. Some of it's neat but it's not really any more valuable to my life than doing even-less-useful-but-more-fun recreational math puzzles. Most people's lives and jobs involve even less math than mine does. More stats probably would have been helpful. Anything less-obviously-useful needs a hell of a lot more emphasis on what it's used for and how to apply it than I ever received, IMO, unless you're a pure-math major, and certainly in k-12 since almost none of the kids are going to be math majors.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Note that getting rid of tailored instruction does not just "eliminate opportunity for accelerated math", it also makes it harder to access remedial math instruction promptly for those who need it. This is how you get students who can't quite grok negative numbers or fractions when they're in a frickin' Algebra I class. It absolutely hurts vulnerable students. Of course the most common 'solution' is then to get rid of "advanced" stuff like Algebra as a graduation requirement altogether, which is an even clearer disservice to students and their surrounding communities.
- dmitrygr 5y ago
  I do not yet have kids, but shit like this is why i already have a bank account saving money for private school. This move will not produce more equality - quite the opposite. All those whose parents can afford it will be in private school learning Algebra, and the rest will be left behind.
  - _rpd 5y ago
    This is already happening in a significant way. See also: why funding schools with property taxes is objectively evil. The only mitigating factor is Khan Academy and its surrounding ecosystem. A motivated learner with internet access can excel in spite of the school system.
    - analognoise 5y ago
      Ugh, the "incorruptibles" fallacy but in a different format. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! So and so came from a violent environment with food scarcity, and THEY succeeded, so you can too!" - Nevermind that that person's environment produces generation after generation of poverty (hence, "cycle") and violence. Khan Academy mitigates nothing - it's a structural failure.
      - _rpd 5y ago
        Tens of millions of students and 240,000 thousand teachers in 50 countries. Hopefully one day I can achieve such failure. https://khanacademyannualreport.org/ https://khanacademyannualreport.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/donate https://www.khanacademy.org/donate
- yaacov 5y ago
  It’s still bad, but the tweet mischaracterizes the report. Nowhere does it say that 8th grade algebra or 12th grade calc will be removed.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    For those of us not in the know, could you explain how the report is bad? It doesn't remove 8th grade algebra or 12th grade calculus, so it's not bad for those reasons. So far so good. What does it do that is bad?
tonymet 5y ago
There is a superficial push to "get more people into STEM". But STEM is undermined by reducing competitiveness. What we are creating is a watered down and un-competitive STEM
- baybal2 5y ago
  100% on the same page with you on this point. You don't need super geniuses to run factories, just competent people whom you don't afraid to leave alone with a welding machine.
  - tonymet 5y ago
    I agree in part. I think we have a major weakness in general competence, resourcefulness, tenacity & technical ability that would be needed for a large segment of production– like your welding factory example. But much of the growth and competitiveness will come from very sophisticated industries requiring highly specialized STEM experience. Think of a Tesla or Space X company. You need both a large number of competent technically skilled people. But they are powered by an adequate and smaller number of very highly specialized researchers and engineers designing the product. Both of these segments are lacking investments in the USA
    - baybal2 5y ago
      > But they are powered by an adequate and smaller number of very highly specialized researchers and engineers designing the product. It doesn't work this way. You will get very smart people knowing what to do. But they will not come to work in your city if there will be no factories to make their smart designs, and hire them. Many tried, many, many to just have RnD shop, and ship everything else to China. It did not work even for Apple for example. Most of their engineering has moved to China, and they are very shy getting public about this fact. People in Apple RnD office in Kerry Plaza for example were for years forbidden to even disclose the fact that they worked for Apple.
chrisco255 5y ago
I remember there was some sort of push to shift from STEM to STEAM, where A is Arts. And that signaled to me that other groups of people were trying to pile on to get access to funding opportunities. It also means a dilution of focus. STEM is already pretty broad. This article is all about fabs. That is a very niche part of STEM. How do you make sure the U.S. becomes strategically focused on developing the skills for running fabs if there's such a political debate over the importance of various majors who want to be incorporated into an already broad category? See: https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/stem-vs-steam https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/stem-vs-steam
- cperciva 5y ago
  I've also recently come across Science Technology Engineering Arts Mathematics and Design. It's absolutely about other groups trying to pile on and say "we're important and deserve extra funding too".
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    It's almost like certain decisions don't benefit from being politicized. But try telling that to millenials today and you'll get an earful.
- amirhirsch 5y ago
  Teachers aren't just piling on for funding. Like the blog post you linked says, teachers find that creative/artistic applications of technology/science/math/engineering tends to increase joy and interest in students. Push back to this "shift" feels like: "Back in my day, we wrote accounting software and called it STEM" fwiw I sell LEGO drone kits
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    My point is that STEM is already too broad as it is to focus resources on chip fabrication. Neither Accounting Software skills nor Interior Design skills should be eligible for funding for this stated purpose. But certainly diluting STEM just causes us to move further from that goal. The types of approaches to early education are going to be more broad, as is necessary (and LEGO drone kits sound like a great approach to that), but a student has to specialize as they advance to higher education, and if we're not funneling enough students into the critical categories, we can lose all of our strategic advantage in technology.
amznthrwaway 5y ago
[STEM Education](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=STEM+education&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=STEM+education...) as a term used in writing, has grown quickly and steadily from the late 90s through today. CS grads/year have tripled since the late 90s. The only “egalitarian” measure I’ve seen near STEM are efforts to bring more STEM education to more people. But the reality is, this is an opinion piece by a shoddy writer who gets paid for clicks and who doesn’t care about factual errors that stand between him and a storyline that his audience enjoys.
ForHackernews 5y ago
It's all bollocks, of course. There are hardly any jobs in Science or Mathematics, not really that many in Engineering, and among "Technology" the only genuinely massive sector is software ('eating the world', or so I hear). So in reality what this massive "STEM" push amounts to is an excuse to trick children into wasting their time going thousands of dollars into debt getting useless degrees in mechanical engineering or mathematics before they can attend a Javascript bootcamp to become actually-employable.
- durge 5y ago
  If you are any good at mechanical engineering or math, you can find a job in those fields. If you're not very good, learn Javascript. It works itself out.
whatshisface 5y ago
By the time the change to school focus percolates through and hits the labor market the shortages will have moved around. See: Electrical engineers 1980-2000.
davio 5y ago
My wife sells to schools and librarians every day. STEM is now STEAM. I asked what STEAM is... It's STEM, plus Art
pdonis 5y ago
The article lost me over a much more basic point: its unstated and unexamined assumption that "STEM", and indeed education and society in general, needs to be centrally controlled. For example, consider this right at the end: "What I insist that we do is to refocus our STEM education debates on the right question. And that question is not “Who deserves what"?”. It’s “Who will run the fabs?”." First, where does he get off "insisting" anything? If he's so gung ho on improving education, why is he wasting his time writing a blog post instead of going out and doing the hard work of actually educating some people? But even leaving that aside, why do "we" have to debate this question? "We" don't determine who runs the fabs; the companies that own the fabs do. Nor do "we" need to centrally control what education kids get; the fact that we have a huge, bureaucratic, centrally controlled public education system in the US is a bug, not a feature. But not to this author; in fact, he is basically arguing for expanding the central control model of education: "[T]he notion that the purpose of education should be to discover and elevate natural talent is fundamentally flawed, as the entire previous section of this post argued. Finding a few kids capable of defeating China in a math competition is useless compared to the task of training millions of kids to work in high-tech export industries." So now the education system is supposed to do job training for specific skills? Didn't that used to be called "apprenticeship"? And didn't it used to be done as a private thing, without having to drag a huge, bloated bureaucracy into the mix? And what, exactly, is wrong with the idea that education should discover and elevate natural talent? Isn't that exactly what you want if you want to have the best chip fabs? Not to mention all the other good things the article mentions. (The author does argue that the belief in "natural talent" has bad side effects and that what should be focused on instead is "long-term motivation". But then he saws off his own branch by admitting that "what people want to do is ultimately more important than what they’re told to do." And when kids are subjected to education to "improve their long-term motivation", they see it, correctly, as being told to do things they don't want to do. The only handle that any education system can really grasp with a kid is "natural talent"--what do they naturally want to do? What are they naturally interested in? And our regimented, structured, centrally controlled bureaucratic education system is perfectly designed to entirely ignore that input--and not just ignore it when deciding what kids will do, but kill it when it is detected, on the grounds that it's disruptive.) To this author, the "millions of kids" are just cogs in a machine, to be moved around to wherever the central authority thinks they will do the most good. (But of course he isn't any such thing.) I'm all for encouraging more kids to go into STEM and to improving the incentives involved so more kids who are interested in STEM will see it as a viable career. But we don't need to make ourselves into China to do that.
baybal2 5y ago
> As near as I can tell, they think this is something recent, but in my experience it started in the 1970s and the emphasis on increasing emphasis on STEM since the mid-2000s is the course correction that’s taking place now. I believe what underscores the current problem is STEM being something special, while current "elite" STEM high school is what used to be a normal school curriculum 60-70 years ago. Everybody miss the fact that curriculums were much more small, compact, pushing, and focused in the West before everything from basket weaving to "business education" managed to sneak into high schools. A conservative, and supposedly "elite" high school in Russia in nineties-noughties were all having more hours, and very few subjects. Mine were 8 classes 5 days a weeks of: - math - physics - geometry - engineering - chemistry - language - pe - biology, literature, history, geography, informatics, 2nd foreign language, military education, professional education as electives And even math, and physics there wasn't anything too fancy. We used textbooks with more hardcore, and grinding emphasis on arithmentics, and analysis/linear/diffeq/stats were put in the last 2 years almost as an afterthought. In physics, they actually removed almost all of curriculum quantum stuff, and put even bigger emphasis on Newtonian mechanics, and Landau-Lifschitz classics for everything else. The school tried to introduce art as was required per new Russian curriculum, but it was quickly thrown out after a year due to militant opposition from parents.

Ancalagon 5y ago

I agree with this. STEM is being shouted from the rooftops from just about every major employer in the US I can think of at this point.

dfmooreqqq 5y ago

Me too. If anything STEM is gaining steam.

mooreds 5y ago

Here was a thread that this article was posted in response to: https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1389456546753437699 https://twitter.com/SteveMillerOC/status/1389456546753437699 "In the name of “equity”, California DOE’s 2021 Mathematics Framework attacks the idea of gifted students and eliminates opportunities for accelerated math. - no grouping students by ability - no Algebra for 8th graders - no Calculus for high schoolers https://cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ https://cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/ "

swiley 5y ago
What an idiotic thing to do. This will absolutely hurt women and underprivileged people far more than privileged men, and it will result in a lot gifted people refusing to cooperate.
- nocommentguy 5y ago
  At some point hanlon’s razor starts getting dull. Follow the money
- Pulcinella 5y ago
  Lol you should actually read the thread and replies. It may calm some of your fears. The author does a whole lot of backpedaling after being called out for the fact that the DOE’s proposal does not, in fact, eliminate HS calculus. Edit: The “lol” wasn’t directed at you by the way. I found it funny that the author of that thread was making a big deal about “the elimination of HS Calculus” and then immediately followed it up with a bunch of hemming and hawing about how that wasn’t true.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    > I found it funny that the author of that thread was making a big deal about “the elimination of HS Calculus” and then immediately followed it up with a bunch of hemming and hawing about how that wasn’t true. From what I've gathered in the thread, the actual official recommendations appears to be simultaneously recommending and not recommending the elimination of HS Calculus.
selimthegrim 5y ago
Algebra is another story but if you ask university math faculty their opinions of high school AP "Calculus" you might want to sit down first.
- ardit33 5y ago
  whats wrong with it? My AP Calc in high school classes (two semesters) in Virgina (Halifax Country) was just as good as Calc 1 in college. I wished I had skipped it. Calc 2 was the class that I found challenging. I also in high school, I took Pascal as a learning to program/into class. I college I learned Ada, and it was a breeze due to my high school. I feel thankful to my last year in public school in middle of no where, rural VA, as it gave me great education/foundation that I did really well in college. I feel bad, as now Virginia is doing the same crap with math in the name of equity. Dumbing things down to the least common denominator is terrible, especially for smart/capable immigrants like I was. We don't have the luxury of private schools, and public schools are starting to pull the rug out as well. It is awful
- fastball 5y ago
  So the solution to poor instruction is to drop it? Math is a useful skill for everyone, including calculus. Not everybody goes to university, so we should teach it in HS.
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    Approaching 40. Haven't ever needed calculus (or Trig) for anything. Sometimes I make an effort to pick math back up just because I feel like I ought to, but it'd be so purely a hobby with no practical use that I have a hard time keeping at it. Some of it's neat but it's not really any more valuable to my life than doing even-less-useful-but-more-fun recreational math puzzles. Most people's lives and jobs involve even less math than mine does. More stats probably would have been helpful. Anything less-obviously-useful needs a hell of a lot more emphasis on what it's used for and how to apply it than I ever received, IMO, unless you're a pure-math major, and certainly in k-12 since almost none of the kids are going to be math majors.
zozbot234 5y ago
Note that getting rid of tailored instruction does not just "eliminate opportunity for accelerated math", it also makes it harder to access remedial math instruction promptly for those who need it. This is how you get students who can't quite grok negative numbers or fractions when they're in a frickin' Algebra I class. It absolutely hurts vulnerable students. Of course the most common 'solution' is then to get rid of "advanced" stuff like Algebra as a graduation requirement altogether, which is an even clearer disservice to students and their surrounding communities.
dmitrygr 5y ago
I do not yet have kids, but shit like this is why i already have a bank account saving money for private school. This move will not produce more equality - quite the opposite. All those whose parents can afford it will be in private school learning Algebra, and the rest will be left behind.
- _rpd 5y ago
  This is already happening in a significant way. See also: why funding schools with property taxes is objectively evil. The only mitigating factor is Khan Academy and its surrounding ecosystem. A motivated learner with internet access can excel in spite of the school system.
  - analognoise 5y ago
    Ugh, the "incorruptibles" fallacy but in a different format. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! So and so came from a violent environment with food scarcity, and THEY succeeded, so you can too!" - Nevermind that that person's environment produces generation after generation of poverty (hence, "cycle") and violence. Khan Academy mitigates nothing - it's a structural failure.
    - _rpd 5y ago
      Tens of millions of students and 240,000 thousand teachers in 50 countries. Hopefully one day I can achieve such failure. https://khanacademyannualreport.org/ https://khanacademyannualreport.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/donate https://www.khanacademy.org/donate
yaacov 5y ago
It’s still bad, but the tweet mischaracterizes the report. Nowhere does it say that 8th grade algebra or 12th grade calc will be removed.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  For those of us not in the know, could you explain how the report is bad? It doesn't remove 8th grade algebra or 12th grade calculus, so it's not bad for those reasons. So far so good. What does it do that is bad?

tonymet 5y ago

There is a superficial push to "get more people into STEM". But STEM is undermined by reducing competitiveness. What we are creating is a watered down and un-competitive STEM

baybal2 5y ago
100% on the same page with you on this point. You don't need super geniuses to run factories, just competent people whom you don't afraid to leave alone with a welding machine.
- tonymet 5y ago
  I agree in part. I think we have a major weakness in general competence, resourcefulness, tenacity & technical ability that would be needed for a large segment of production– like your welding factory example. But much of the growth and competitiveness will come from very sophisticated industries requiring highly specialized STEM experience. Think of a Tesla or Space X company. You need both a large number of competent technically skilled people. But they are powered by an adequate and smaller number of very highly specialized researchers and engineers designing the product. Both of these segments are lacking investments in the USA
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > But they are powered by an adequate and smaller number of very highly specialized researchers and engineers designing the product. It doesn't work this way. You will get very smart people knowing what to do. But they will not come to work in your city if there will be no factories to make their smart designs, and hire them. Many tried, many, many to just have RnD shop, and ship everything else to China. It did not work even for Apple for example. Most of their engineering has moved to China, and they are very shy getting public about this fact. People in Apple RnD office in Kerry Plaza for example were for years forbidden to even disclose the fact that they worked for Apple.

chrisco255 5y ago

I remember there was some sort of push to shift from STEM to STEAM, where A is Arts. And that signaled to me that other groups of people were trying to pile on to get access to funding opportunities. It also means a dilution of focus. STEM is already pretty broad. This article is all about fabs. That is a very niche part of STEM. How do you make sure the U.S. becomes strategically focused on developing the skills for running fabs if there's such a political debate over the importance of various majors who want to be incorporated into an already broad category? See: https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/stem-vs-steam https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/stem-vs-steam

cperciva 5y ago
I've also recently come across Science Technology Engineering Arts Mathematics and Design. It's absolutely about other groups trying to pile on and say "we're important and deserve extra funding too".
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  It's almost like certain decisions don't benefit from being politicized. But try telling that to millenials today and you'll get an earful.
amirhirsch 5y ago
Teachers aren't just piling on for funding. Like the blog post you linked says, teachers find that creative/artistic applications of technology/science/math/engineering tends to increase joy and interest in students. Push back to this "shift" feels like: "Back in my day, we wrote accounting software and called it STEM" fwiw I sell LEGO drone kits
- chrisco255 5y ago
  My point is that STEM is already too broad as it is to focus resources on chip fabrication. Neither Accounting Software skills nor Interior Design skills should be eligible for funding for this stated purpose. But certainly diluting STEM just causes us to move further from that goal. The types of approaches to early education are going to be more broad, as is necessary (and LEGO drone kits sound like a great approach to that), but a student has to specialize as they advance to higher education, and if we're not funneling enough students into the critical categories, we can lose all of our strategic advantage in technology.

amznthrwaway 5y ago

[STEM Education](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=STEM+education&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=STEM+education...) as a term used in writing, has grown quickly and steadily from the late 90s through today. CS grads/year have tripled since the late 90s. The only “egalitarian” measure I’ve seen near STEM are efforts to bring more STEM education to more people. But the reality is, this is an opinion piece by a shoddy writer who gets paid for clicks and who doesn’t care about factual errors that stand between him and a storyline that his audience enjoys.

ForHackernews 5y ago

It's all bollocks, of course. There are hardly any jobs in Science or Mathematics, not really that many in Engineering, and among "Technology" the only genuinely massive sector is software ('eating the world', or so I hear). So in reality what this massive "STEM" push amounts to is an excuse to trick children into wasting their time going thousands of dollars into debt getting useless degrees in mechanical engineering or mathematics before they can attend a Javascript bootcamp to become actually-employable.

durge 5y ago
If you are any good at mechanical engineering or math, you can find a job in those fields. If you're not very good, learn Javascript. It works itself out.

whatshisface 5y ago

By the time the change to school focus percolates through and hits the labor market the shortages will have moved around. See: Electrical engineers 1980-2000.

davio 5y ago

My wife sells to schools and librarians every day. STEM is now STEAM. I asked what STEAM is... It's STEM, plus Art

pdonis 5y ago

The article lost me over a much more basic point: its unstated and unexamined assumption that "STEM", and indeed education and society in general, needs to be centrally controlled. For example, consider this right at the end: "What I insist that we do is to refocus our STEM education debates on the right question. And that question is not “Who deserves what"?”. It’s “Who will run the fabs?”." First, where does he get off "insisting" anything? If he's so gung ho on improving education, why is he wasting his time writing a blog post instead of going out and doing the hard work of actually educating some people? But even leaving that aside, why do "we" have to debate this question? "We" don't determine who runs the fabs; the companies that own the fabs do. Nor do "we" need to centrally control what education kids get; the fact that we have a huge, bureaucratic, centrally controlled public education system in the US is a bug, not a feature. But not to this author; in fact, he is basically arguing for expanding the central control model of education: "[T]he notion that the purpose of education should be to discover and elevate natural talent is fundamentally flawed, as the entire previous section of this post argued. Finding a few kids capable of defeating China in a math competition is useless compared to the task of training millions of kids to work in high-tech export industries." So now the education system is supposed to do job training for specific skills? Didn't that used to be called "apprenticeship"? And didn't it used to be done as a private thing, without having to drag a huge, bloated bureaucracy into the mix? And what, exactly, is wrong with the idea that education should discover and elevate natural talent? Isn't that exactly what you want if you want to have the best chip fabs? Not to mention all the other good things the article mentions. (The author does argue that the belief in "natural talent" has bad side effects and that what should be focused on instead is "long-term motivation". But then he saws off his own branch by admitting that "what people want to do is ultimately more important than what they’re told to do." And when kids are subjected to education to "improve their long-term motivation", they see it, correctly, as being told to do things they don't want to do. The only handle that any education system can really grasp with a kid is "natural talent"--what do they naturally want to do? What are they naturally interested in? And our regimented, structured, centrally controlled bureaucratic education system is perfectly designed to entirely ignore that input--and not just ignore it when deciding what kids will do, but kill it when it is detected, on the grounds that it's disruptive.) To this author, the "millions of kids" are just cogs in a machine, to be moved around to wherever the central authority thinks they will do the most good. (But of course he isn't any such thing.) I'm all for encouraging more kids to go into STEM and to improving the incentives involved so more kids who are interested in STEM will see it as a viable career. But we don't need to make ourselves into China to do that.

baybal2 5y ago

> As near as I can tell, they think this is something recent, but in my experience it started in the 1970s and the emphasis on increasing emphasis on STEM since the mid-2000s is the course correction that’s taking place now. I believe what underscores the current problem is STEM being something special, while current "elite" STEM high school is what used to be a normal school curriculum 60-70 years ago. Everybody miss the fact that curriculums were much more small, compact, pushing, and focused in the West before everything from basket weaving to "business education" managed to sneak into high schools. A conservative, and supposedly "elite" high school in Russia in nineties-noughties were all having more hours, and very few subjects. Mine were 8 classes 5 days a weeks of: - math - physics - geometry - engineering - chemistry - language - pe - biology, literature, history, geography, informatics, 2nd foreign language, military education, professional education as electives And even math, and physics there wasn't anything too fancy. We used textbooks with more hardcore, and grinding emphasis on arithmentics, and analysis/linear/diffeq/stats were put in the last 2 years almost as an afterthought. In physics, they actually removed almost all of curriculum quantum stuff, and put even bigger emphasis on Newtonian mechanics, and Landau-Lifschitz classics for everything else. The school tried to introduce art as was required per new Russian curriculum, but it was quickly thrown out after a year due to militant opposition from parents.