IT Slide?
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
How about some scary education statistics? I know that we like to throw these things out every once in a while to demonstrate just how bad things are, while still failing to make any real change. Anyway, the Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences “Rising Above the Storm” committee informs us that:
Nearly 60 percent of the patents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the field of information technology now originate in Asia. The United States ranks 17th among nations in high-school graduation rate and 14th in college graduation rate.
In China, virtually all high school students study calculus; in the United States, 13 percent study calculus.
For every American elementary and secondary school student studying Chinese, there are 10,000 students in China studying English.
The average American youth now spends 66 percent more time watching television than in school.
I will confess that one of the things that always gets me about these kinds of lists is how they don’t really delve into differences in cultural schooling systems, colleges, etc. But that’s not to say that there isn’t plenty to be worried about here. Aside from the television point, the thing that I find most disquieting is actually the factoid about IT patents. It seems like a small thing, but I think it may bode ill. After all, one of the arguments that is often made in an attempt to refute concerns about the Boy Crisis is that men still dominate America’s information technology fields, which is a booming and expanding industry. (And which, claim the naysayers, doesn’t necessarily require the same kind of formal education that boys have been dropping out of. I’m not entirely sure that I agree with that claim, based on a quick glance at the want-ads, but that’s beside the point.) More to the point is this–if we start to stagnate or fall behind in information technology sector as well, it really makes me wonder what that might mean for the next generation of boys entering the workforce–and what it means about how well they’re being prepared to enter the workforce now.
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