Axil Axil <janap...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The numbers are even more sobering when compared among only the 34 OECD > countries. The United States ranked 26th in math — trailing nations such as > the Slovakia, Portugal and Russia. What’s more, American high school > students dropped to 21st in science (from 17th in 2009) and slipped to 17th > in reading (from 14th in 2009), according to the results. > American culture has never put much value on academic study. It is dismissed as "book learning." Visitors from Europe remarked on that in the 18th and 19th centuries. We do not care about history either. As Mark Twain put it, we don't put no stock in dead people. Compared to people in Europe or Japan, Americans know little about science. Many of them are strongly opposed to things like evolution, which conflicts with their religion. However, with a population of 300 million, you can find millions of smart people who do value academics and science. I have been to universities around the world, and studied at ones in the US and Japan. The students and professors at elite universities in every country are as good as the ones elsewhere. Stanford, Georgia Tech, and Cornell students work as hard and know as much as students in London, Paris, Beijing or Tokyo. They work a lot harder than students at the elite National Universities in Japan. (If you don't work hard at Cornell, you flunk, which never happens in Japan.) Even if we cannot find a few hundred thousand highly qualified freshmen every year, we import large numbers of very smart people from other countries. Our universities are now and have always been the most cosmopolitan on earth. Even when Jefferson was setting up the University of Virginia that was true. You don't find professors from a dozen other countries in Japan or Beijing, but you do at any Ivy League school. So, the fact that Americans in general are not well educated will have little impact on cutting edge R&D on something like cold fusion, or the human genome. By the way, the educational attainments of Japanese students are somewhat overrated, in my opinion. Japanese mass media articles on science are only marginally more sophisticated or accurate than U.S. mass media articles. Their mass media articles about cold fusion are as bad as ours. Their political and technical leaders are as ignorant of cold fusion as ours are, according to Mizuno and others who have met with them in recent years. Japan has no advantage in cold fusion. I doubt that China does either. Granted, I know much less about the situation there. - Jed
