China Churning out Science/Technology College Grads

Everything, repeat, Everything is made in China.

It's scary I tell ya!

We've got a similar problem here. The vast majority of students in Australia are studying commerce/economics. Most have been influenced by the obscene salaries earned by executives these days. And the few good scientists we do produce invariably end up doing great work somewhere else in the world.

The question, 'what ought schools/colleges/universities to be teaching?' isn't a simple one. Someone on the board of directors of a high tech firm will likely answer that question quite differently than, say, a family court judge or an artist or a policeman.

The business community, quite naturally, tends to perceive the community as a resource for both consumers and workers, and tends to think schools ought to be in the service of it's activities and goals. But if you brought together all the researchers working on cures for disease, they'd argue for quite different curricula.

I think that as newspapers and media are increasingly picked up by large conglomerates whose interest is really quite mercenary (you keep a paper because it is profitable, regardless of quality or its service to the community) there is a commensurate forwarding of the notion that educational institutions ought to technical schools, providing needed fodder for industry. Thus, we also get a lot of 'brain drain' articles.

But it seems to me that such is a pretty meager notion of education. If one thinks about the sort of person one wants as neighbors in the community, a much richer notion of optimum educational goals begins to appear - they ought to know, for one simple example, how hard won has been this voyage towards free speech and democracy. The Magna Carta story becomes rather more important than keyboard skills.