This is a very important speech and it has very important ramifications.
Professor Temin tackles too many issues on his speech.
Staying with the Social Capital issue, which per se, is very complex but it is a very important one.
He ties the Social Capital -which he says is deteriorating- to type of schooling private vs public.
The issue is more of curriculum than in to type of schooling private vs public.
If you look to the curriculum today the overall opinion is to focus on STEM.
STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — in an interdisciplinary and applied approach.
This focus in STEM is nothing different from what happen in America in the wake of the USSR launching the Sputinik in the late 50s.
In the aftermath of the launching of the Sputnik, (USSR first artificial satellite) the US changed the curriculum to adapt to the Cold War competition with the Soviets by focusing the education system in science and math.
Today the focus is on STEM, the general idea goes: it is worth pursuing STEM because these fields are not attracting many students. That is compared with Asians who form more people versed on these fields.
The Soviets were forming many technical people them.
Let's go to real life:
Whenever, in my profession, I have dealt with people, the most intelligent and easy to do business with were people from the legal and finance professions. You just use words with them.
The worse people to deal with are always engineers and other technical professionals. You need to explain to them. Then you need to skecth in a piece of paper to them what you just said . And after that you need to explain what you have drawn.
And then, if they have to articulate to you something you don't know, they are not able to. I know I am generalizing and there are bright techies out there who are extremely articulate. But those are exceptions.
Techies always draw from what they have seen somebody doing and heard others telling how they did it.
I discussed these issues a lot here in SI. Particularly with Moonminoid, who is a teacher who disappeared from SI. He told me that in the US university education changed to (in his words) a more round students than pure technical ones.
I write all that because myself I spent a lot of time studying (by myself) humanities: Sociology, economics, history, political sciences. When doing that in my early 20s people were telling there wasn't any use for that stuff I was putting too much effort in learning.
Guess what? All that enabled me to learn fast other stuff besides humanities. Why? Because the world is human first. Technical second. |
