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It's interesting that the very first question - the very first question, in the mid-1950s! - to von Neumann is about STEM education, and his answer is, we need
by julianeon 3y ago
It's interesting that the very first question - the very first question, in the mid-1950s! - to von Neumann is about STEM education, and his answer is, we need more people, and we need more & better education. And we need it badly.
Now I'll pause here to say that, when we praise a guy like von Neumann, it can have a distancing effect. If for example I say "this site needs a better UI," it's something we'll usually take at face value, on its merits. But if, say, Elon Musk says the same thing, it becomes more like trivia associated with Elon Musk, not a statement we think through by itself.
If we treat von Neumann like a guy with authority speaking on the topic of science education, then you could take his words, almost without any change, repeat them in 2023, and find they are as true now as they were then. As food for thought, I'd say, if you consider von Neumann to be a personal hero, then consider honoring him by doing what you can for science education.
- richard___ 3y agoScience education has been exponentially improved by chatgpt
- turzmo 3y agoNice troll
- richard___ 3y agoI'm not trolling. My educational credentials >> the downvoters, that I can say
- turzmo 3y agoPerhaps you can expand on why you think that’s the case then?
- mycall 3y agoAre there any educational science program GPTs yet?
- philwelch 3y agoI agree that we need more and better STEM education but I'm not sure we're in the same place we were in the 1950's. There were huge education reform programs after Sputnik that added more homework and introduced lab science at the high school level, and the goal of these programs was to provide a foundation for future scientists and engineers. In later decades, different goals have been prioritized; rather than providing a foundation for the brightest minds to become the scientific leaders of the future, education policy since the 1960's started to focus more and more on using education to improve social equality and improve the lot of disadvantaged populations. In recent years, the latter approach has reached the reductio ad absurdum of some school districts abolishing eighth grade algebra classes for reasons of racial equity. What I am genuinely curious about is how similar the current state of STEM education is to the state before Sputnik. My impression is that Sputnik was a massive sea change that never actually got completely reversed; for instance, I've heard that before Sputnik, high schools weren't even teaching trigonometry, let alone calculus. I've found sources that attribute lab science in K-12 to the Sputnik reforms, as well as an increase in homework (which had actually been abolished by 1900's progressives). And if that's true, then yes, let's still improve science education, but let's also acknowledge that things possibly aren't quite as bad as they were in von Neumann's time.