Education, Rawls, and Teaching

The Wall Street Journal had an article on the failure of Science and Math education in the US. As one involved at the latter end of the process I see that I have had not a single US born student in my last five years. They have been mostly Asian. I also once spent a year teaching at Columbia University School of Business and I found that most of the students had at best a 10th grade understanding of math and were generally ignorant of science, other that what the NY Times told them.

Thus I was not surprised when I read the Rawlsian head of U Penn state:

"AMY GUTMANN: The Sputnik era didn't come because a lot of idealists said we had to be better. It came because there were idealists as there are today who said we're in trouble as a country, we have to compete against the Russians. We have to compete today against the Chinese and Indians who are graduating tens of thousands more very talented science, math and engineering graduates from their colleges. They're not doing better than we are at the college and university level, but they're doing massively better than we are in the numbers. They have hugely greater populations."

She uses the term "idealists" to describe the decision makers. As one who participated in the process at the time there was abject terror about the Russians and the delivery of weapons from space. She is wrong. It was not the idealists but rather the realists. It was in fact the idealists who almost lost our civilization to Stalin.

A good factual history is the recent book by Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, which recounts those times fairly accurately. I content that they may not be competing well against American at U Penn, in Arts and the like, but they are beating the heck out of Americans in graduate studies at MIT and Stanford! Here is a Rawlsian educator who in my opinion is defective in basic facts. It is NOT the populations, of China and India it is their competitive spirit. They are more individualistic competitors than most American students. They have not spent time reading Rawls and Marx, in the Chinese case despite their underlying Government, they are striving for success, they are competing. They do not play games where everyone wins, there are many who do not make it and they have to "deal with it". Frankly it is the Rawlsian ethic of having the least do as well as the most, the idea of communal ownership of even one's intellect, that gives rise to what we see in the US today.

In contrast to the every Rawlsian Gutmann is Joel Klein who states:

"JOEL KLEIN: The most important thing is to bring to K-12 education college graduates who excel in math and science. Those countries that are doing best are recruiting their K-12 teachers from the top third of their college graduates. America is recruiting our teachers generally from the bottom third, and when you go into our high-needs communities, we're clearly underserving them."

Yes, teachers are from the bottom third. To teach Math and Science one needs the nest educated. Thus if one has a PhD say from MIT in Math or Science, and if one has taught for say 30 years, one is hardly qualified to teach Geometry in a public school. Why, no certificate, no training in overhead projectors, no experience in the training of the psychology of dealing with inequality amongst class members, not training in developing a Rawlsian ethic, and not a member of the teacher's union.

Now back to Gutmann. She states:

"MS. GUTMANN: The single biggest lever for economic innovation in our society is education, and it's not a direct lever of the President.

So what he can do is only really fund excellence initiatives, and they have to be distributed to the states. And I think the key here is making K-12 education more competitive on the ground. Let me give you an example. When the stimulus went through, $10.4 billion was put in for [National Institutes of Health] funding. That money in biomedical research is going to generate the innovations of tomorrow. There has to be at the K-12 level an understanding of how the federal government can incentivize competition."

The single biggest lever for innovation is NOT education, that is necessary but not sufficient, it is an entrepreneurial environment, the willingness to take risks, to seek regards, to better the competition, to outright win. That is antithetical to a Rawlsian like Gutmann! Thus Klein is correct in his assessment whereas Gutmann is well off base. Yet it is the same ad hoc propiter hoc arguments of Gutmann that are used to justify the current Administrations efforts. In reality it is competition and reward that motivates and stimulates not the idealists of Gutmann. I can remember many of the idealists in the 50s and early 60s, and for the most part, I believe without exception, the developments came from the entrepreneurs, not the idealists!