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Smarten Up!
January 25, 2008
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
Browsing through the New Scientist the other day, I came across a statistic to absolutely chill the heart.
The Relevance of Science of Education Project – an international project looking at science education in 20 countries , co-ordinated by Norwegian researchers Camilla Schreiner and Svein Sjoberg – administered a questionnaire about science education to students in 20 countries around the world. Primarily, they asked students about how relevant they felt science education was and how much they enjoyed it. But they also asked students a series of questions about how science related to their personal identity, and in particular, how they felt about getting jobs in the fields of science and technology.
Some of the results were unsurprising; for instance, that in all countries apart from Uganda, boys were more positive about science and technology jobs than girls. But the most surprising results of all were when they regressed the answer to the questions: “I would like to become a scientist” and “I would like to get a job in technology” against the UN Human Development Index Scores for each country. What they found was that secondary students’ interest in science was almost perfectly negatively correlated with a country’s economic development. The relation was -.094 for the scientist question and -.91 for the technology question. In educational research, those kinds of correlations are almost unheard of – it is certainly the strongest relationship I have seen in any research for quite some time.
Broadly speaking, kids in the developing world are smart enough to see studying science as a route to a batter future. Kids in the developed world, on the other hand, seem to have a difficult time seeing past the fact that “math is hard” and prefer careers in other areas instead. This, presumably, explains to a large extent why Canada and the US have significantly lower proportions of their undergraduate student body enrolled in science and engineering than the rest of the OECD and also why we have significantly higher levels of people enrolled in social sciences and humanities.
Some might argue that this state of affairs doesn’t matter much. North Americans have been shirkers in the science department for some time, but that hasn’t necessarily led – over time – to slower rates of economic growth. Indeed, some such as Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind) have even tried to argue that high rates of enrolment in non-scientific, “creative” programs such as Literature Art and Music are probably a good thing because in a more chaotic, non-linear world, the adaptive thinking skills of these programs are worth a lot of money.
The best you can say about this is: possibly. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it for a couple of reasons.
First, North Americans could ignore math and science right through to undergraduate levels because we always had the option of importing brains from the developing world at the graduate school level to keep our economies at the cutting edge. We were happy to have them, because it meant high returns for little cost for the native-born, and they were happy to come because North America provided them with opportunities unavailable at home. One important consequence of globalization, however, is that these people are starting to find opportunities in their home countries. We still need them; they no longer need us quite as much.
Second, a significant chunk of the profits from the Information Technology revolution of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century came about because of the opportunities for profit in digitizing what can broadly be called “culture” (i.e. text, images and sound). For as long as this tech wave is brining profits, there will be returns to the people that Daniel Pink calls “the creatives”. However, come the next big tech wave – which will probably be based on nanotechnology or proteonomics – it’s hard to see where the “creatives” will be adding a lot of value. More likely, money and value will come almost exclusively from people in the physics, engineering and biology, as well as the business program grads who manage them (although even here, strong science backgrounds will likely be necessary in future in order to prosper).
In short – we have a big problem on our hands. Our economies are fundamentally driven by science and technology, and yet, when it comes to educating young people, our social values and teaching practices lead students to avoid the sciences. Young people in developing countries, perhaps less clouded by affluence, have their eye on the prize: they understand that prosperity, in the long run, and at both the national and personal levels, comes from mastering and furthering scientific and technical knowledge.
If we wish to remain masters of our own economic future, this has to change – fast. It means finding ways to get people with real scientific experience into the classroom. Too often, primary and secondary school science is being taught by people with insufficient scientific backgrounds. Serious educational research needs to be done about instructional methods and curriculum that can make science more interesting and relevant in order to make sure young people are actually enthused and inspired by their lessons.
The success or failure of economies is – in the long run - intimately tied to the success and failures of our educational systems. In a world economy driven by scientific innovation, it is hard to imagine any job which is more important to a country’s long-term economic security than its ability to produce scientifically literate citizens.
We may not be failing in this task yet – but the warning signs are there, and we’d be foolish to ignore them.
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