BROADCASTS.com

This week we talk with Vivek \n Wadhwa, columnist for Business Week, Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law \n School and executive in residence at Duke University. Wadhwa will be discussing \n his recent article (The \n Science Education Myth) regarding science education in the United States.

Quotes from the show:

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\u201cIt\u2019s commonly accepted that the U.S. is falling behind other countries \n because our children score badly on math and science test scores and so on. \n The National Academies has sited this data; the President alluded to it in \n his last State of the Union address in 2006, the U.S. Department of Education \n talks about it. Everyone seems to accept the fact that the U.S. is falling \n behind and there is something wrong with our education system...I had a suspicion \n this was wrong.?

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\u201cWe actually added up the numbers, and we found that the U.S. graduates \n a comparable number [engineers] to India, and the Chinese numbers are bogus. \n Basically they\u2019re published from the Chinese government and you can\u2019t challenge \n it; the Chinese numbers are high, but there are huge quality issues in both \n India and China.?

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\u201cThe U.S is in pretty good shape. Maybe there are a few small nations, \n like Latvia and Singapore that come in first place, but those are small countries \n and you can\u2019t compare a population of the size and the diversity of the U.S.A. \n with countries like Singapore, which are small and have a different system \n than we do.?

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\u201cAlmost every indicator that they looked at showed the same trend \u2013 that \n the U.S.A. was improving; it wasn\u2019t getting worse. And that no other country \n in the world was improving like the U.S.A. was.?

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\u201cIf you look at what spurred the sciences, it was Sputnik. The Manhattan \n project employed 100-200,000 engineers. Whenever there\u2019s been a crisis, the \n U.S. has responded to it by putting together national programs. The fact is \n that global warming is a critical national program. The fact that we\u2019re consuming \n oil and burning up the world is a critical threat to the U.S.A. There are \n so many diseases that need to be eradicated. Instead of spending another 100 \n billion dollars on Iraq, why don\u2019t we take 100 billion dollars and spend it \n on doing constructive research on eliminating diseases, of improving the world.?

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\u201cI think the U.S. really has to get its act together. We have to create \n the demand for engineers and scientists, and create the excitement, and create \n the motivation for our students to move into these fields. Just graduating \n more doesn\u2019t solve any it just creates unemployment. But create a demand, \n create an excitement, is how you solve one of the problems.?

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Links:

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• \n The Science Education Myth, by Vivek Wadhwa from Business Week
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• \n Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and \n Workforce Demand, by \n B. Lindsay Lowell, \n Harold Salzman; report by the Urban Institute
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• \n Rising above the Gathering Storm; report from the National \n Academies Press
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• \n State of the Union Address by the President; January 31, 2006
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• \n U.S. Must act to Close Dentist Gap from Pure Pedantry
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• \n A Silver Lining to Our Science Struggles by David Epstein, from SEED \n Magazine (article \n as podcast)
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• \n In Science Classrooms, A Blast of Fresh O2 by Natalie Angier \n from the New York Times
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• Math and \n Science Education from NPR's Science Friday; November 9th, 2007
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