I’ve been thinking about science education in our country quite a bit lately. This morning I woke up thinking about something that I think illustrates the difference between public perception of science in the late sixties versus today.
I recalled a story my mother told me when I was young. My mom had taken a science course in high school where she claimed she once did an experiment the nearly burned down the school. The next year the teacher of this science class asked her if she would be taking chemistry that year. My mom respectfully declined.
I think back to when I was in high school. It seemed to me that the attitude was more like take the minimum requirements to get into college. When I was a senior, I though perhaps I’d like to be an engineer. I seriously had a high school English teacher tell me that I should leave those kind of science jobs to the ‘real’ geniuses.
It seems that our society’s attitude towards science and math has really changed. It seems that within one generation we went from a society encouraging our young people to study science to a society telling our young people, oh no… don’t do that, it’s too hard.
I find it very frustrating. I truly believe that if taught well anyone with positive encouragement both at school and at home can learn and excel at math and science. Instead of telling our young people to ‘take the minimum’, I think the message should be take as much as you can get.
I totally agree with you, but I think there’s another component. I really think girls are discouraged from math/science at an early age almost automatically, and that has pretty much always been the case. Do you think that had any effect on your situation in high school?
(PS. I met Steve on the DC trip and linked over from his blog where I was searching for physicist punk rock. The title of your post just caught my eye since it’s something I’m generally cranky about.)
I’m not sure if that effect was present or not. Certainly not all of my teachers were as negative as this particular English teacher. I never picked up on any gender discrimination at my school.
The first time I ever noticed any different treatment because of my sex was my first year of graduate school. At the time, I found it very upsetting. However, I later came to realize that it was the Professor was honestly trying, but just didn’t get it.