I ran across the statistic that 70% of Americans do not have a college degree. Cited in the article is a 2007 article called “Scientific Literacy: How Do American’s Stack Up?” .
Click the link to see where I found the image.
I’ve been thinking about subjects like Evolution which are still very important to me due to the debate that shouldn’t be necessary. In addition to science, history, and critical thinking skills seem to be in jeopardy when such a large portion of people aren’t encouraged to think academically and rigorously. So now I’m wondering if there’s a way to make these values more important and more accessible to the people who didn’t get them in college. I imagine even a growth of 20% of educated people would be a significant zeitgeist shift because some amount of non-educated people still values science and critical thinking.
Any thoughts?
I haven’t been able to get this stat out of my head since I stumbled on it last week. It plays repeatedly with horrific consequences. Education tends to open up twice the salary but I know that hasn’t been the case for everyone. The other thing is higher education is a place to learn the same values of debate and research and critical thinking.
I think education is one of those uber valuable things like water. And we as a society need to find a way to make it essentially free to the people who would take advantage of such education and back up the people that do with child support and books and such. An easy way to compete on the global scale would be to train a more adaptable and more profitable workforce. I like the fact that I out earn a lot of people because the economic hard times aren’t so hard. Now I want to riddle out a way in which I’m not the only one getting these privileges.
The problem is that according to Gallop polls, there isn’t a significant difference in the percentage of those without degrees who don’t believe in education and those with degrees. I saw them a couple of months ago (you could look them up I’m sure) – something like a shift of less than ten percent. But when you consider the quality of american education and that great big chunk they call the bible belt and all those theological seminaries some of which require confession to statements of faith – biblical inerrancy etc…. what a gloomy gloomy picture. Time to re-evalutate and reform the education system!
I would agree with that especially because I do not think college is the only way to get educated. Educated is poorly defined by me and in most places I look.
What I want to do now is come up with a defined ideal education which focuses on people having enough knowledge of critical thinking, the history of current political themes, knowing how to dig into research, and even debate skills. I don’t care what people think as long as they do that thinking with quality processes.
When I get that ideal figured out, I can take a stab at the problem of how to get more people to that level and how to measure how many people are there now. This isn’t my area of expertise but looking at my political environment, it might not be anyone’s area of expertise and somebody should step up.
An ideal education system needs to cater for different strengths and weaknesses and learning abilities of its students. A good education system needs to provide enough teachers to keep the student teacher ration low. I had a pretty good broad education with well educated, critical thinking and capable teachers, a non american education. It gave me special opportunities to excel in areas of particular interest.
And also, if the student hasn’t achieved some standard level, I think the system has an interest to keep the student on the road to that level of education.
I don’t mean to say everyone needs to understand calculus. But we all need enough education to understand when calculus is the correct tool to solve a problem.