The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [158]
We need more money for teachers’ training and salaries, and for laboratories. But all across America, school-bond issues are regularly voted down. No one suggests that property taxes be used to provide for the military budget, or for agriculture subsidies, or for cleaning up toxic wastes. Why just education? Why not support it from general taxes on the local and state levels? What about a special education tax for those industries with special needs for technically trained workers?
American schoolchildren don’t do enough schoolwork. There are 180 days in the standard school year in the United States, as compared with 220 in South Korea, about 230 in Germany, and 243 in Japan. Children in some of these countries go to school on Saturday. The average American high school student spends 3.5 hours a week on homework. The total time devoted to studies, in and out of the classroom, is about 20 hours a week. Japanese fifth-graders average 33 hours a week. Japan, with half the population of the United States, produces twice as many scientists and engineers with advanced degrees every year.
During four years of high school, American students spend less than 1,500 hours on such subjects as mathematics, science and history. Japanese, French and German students spend more than twice as much time. A 1994 report commissioned by the US Department of Education notes:
The traditional school day must now fit in a whole set of requirements for what has been called the ‘new work of the schools’ - education about personal safety, consumer affairs, AIDS, conservation and energy, family life and driver’s training.
So, because of the deficiencies of society and the inadequacies of education in the home, only about three hours a day are spent in high school on the core academic subjects.
There’s a widely held perception that science is ‘too hard’ for ordinary people. We can see this reflected in the statistic that only around 10 per cent of American high school students ever opt for a course in physics. What makes science suddenly ‘too hard’? Why isn’t it too hard for the citizens of all those other countries that are outperforming the United States? What has happened to the American genius for science, technical innovation and hard work? Americans once took enormous pride in their inventors, who pioneered the telegraph, telephone, electric light, phonograph, automobile and airplane. Except for computers, all that seems a thing of the past. Where did all that ‘Yankee ingenuity’ go?
Most American children aren’t stupid. Part of the reason they don’t study hard is that they receive few tangible benefits when they do. Competency (that is, actually knowing the stuff) in verbal skills, mathematics, science and history these days doesn’t increase earnings for average young men in their first eight years out of high school, many of whom take service rather than industrial jobs.
In the productive sectors of the economy, though, the story is often different. There are furniture factories, for example, in danger of going out of business - not because there are no customers, but because so few entry-level workers can do simple arithmetic. A major electronics company reports that 80 per cent of its job applicants can’t pass a fifth-grade mathematics test. The United States already is losing some $40 billion a year (mainly in lost productivity and the cost of remedial education) because workers, to too great a degree, can’t read, write, count or think.
In a survey by the US National Science Board of 139 high technology companies