President Obama set a goal today of recruiting 10,000 teachers in science, technology, engineering and math, calling these subjects essential to competing in the 21st-century global economy.
As Market Watch reported he also said:
Speaking in the key battleground state of North Carolina, Obama said the program would involve companies like Intel Corp. doubling their summer internship hiring; helping universities pay for engineering programs; and offering students incentives to finish their degrees.
Now just where are these coming from. You see Engineering Professors, well we never called them teachers, take a bit of time to create and find. I think MIT hires at most a dozen per year in a really great year and then gets 2 or 3 tenured from that batch. You see engineering is kind of really hard, as is physics, biology, chemistry.. Well, Math, that is just impossible. You do not train Math profs, God creates them, and they are rare as hen's teeth.
In fact you do not even train engineers. They are educated, you see, they take really hard courses like strength of materials, solid state electronics, computer architecture, heat moment and mass transfer, organic chemistry, fluid mechanics. You have to choose the best qualified and motivate students. They are educated to make things, not like economists, who just throw equations around and have never been able to predict anything. Not even like lawyers, who talk a lot and well we all know lawyers, my daughter married one. Nice guy but a lawyer.
The stated goal is unachievable. It is based on a fallacy, a set of fallacies! How in heaven's name can one hope to build an economy back with such statements. The Chinese do not do that, their Government is filled with engineers, they at least know of what they speak. They have been working for two generations to get there. Doubtful if any Government program in several lifetimes will get us there.
You see you have to have been educated to get into a good engineering school. Otherwise we train people who do not know engineering. This stated goal is akin to training 10,000 neurosurgeons. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle!
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