Math, Science, and Authordom.
Over on the World Policy Institute’s website Neal Stephenson has a great piece in regards to the unfortunate decline of science in the west. It focuses some points on the job of the science fiction author in regards to creating the vision for big ideas, to give our scientists and engineers the muse so that the “big stuff gets done.” It is an excellent article, and I would suggest that you read it.
I agree with several points that Mr. Stephenson makes. As he states in his article, the silent generation (our grandparent’s and great grandparent’s generations if you are near to my age) have indeed created, great things. They have gifted us nuclear energy, the airplane, the automobile, and so forth and so on. We owe them a great debt. The first half of the 20th century was possibly the greatest recorded period for science and technology. It ushered in an era of discovery and innovation that was unparalleled before it.
I agree with how he takes corporations to task about their unwillingness to spend money to innovate. He mentions what has become a plague of small innovations to just keep the boat steady instead of large ones to really drive our economy and us as a people forward.
There are a few points that I feel he doesn’t mention, that I think should be. As a society, and as the generations that have followed them, we have failed the silent generation, as well as ourselves by not focusing on math and science. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else is. I am after all a Film Major (my only saving grace is that my day job is in a math-intensive field.) from our school to our entertainment we refuse to acknowledge the importance of Math, Science and English in favor of softer subjects. We fail our children everyday by not allowing them to fail, by rigging the system so that the lowest common denominator gets through and can feel good about themselves.
The problem, at least for Americans, begins with the school system. I grew up in an inner-city and went through an inner-city public school system. My education (especially compared to my Wife’s who went to a private school) is abysmal. I struggle everyday with the simplest of sentence structure, and let me not even get into my as/has conundrum. The school system in America, especially in the inner-cities, is too preoccupied with making kids feel good and making passing quotas to worry about actually educating children and getting them involved in the sciences.
That’s just one symptom that I can think of, but Mr. Stephenson explains it all so much better than I ever could.
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