A guest editorial in Science magazine (Jun 24, 2011) makes the telling point that “Education is Not a Race.” The author, Deborah Stipek, is in a position to know. She’s the current dean of Stanford University’s School of Education and she writes persuasively about the importance of “joy in learning.”
It’s impossible to read this otherwise fine editorial, however, without questioning some of the specifics. First, Stanford University boasts operates one of the most exclusive, credentials-based undergraduate admissions policies in the nation. Families compete hard, in some cases preparing their children for years, if not an entire lifetime, to win a coveted spot in Stanford’s freshman class. I would have liked Dean Stipek to make some kind of connection between her institution’s admission and marketing policies and the reason that K-12 education has become a “race” in some quarters of society. When it comes to contributing factors, the policies of Stanford, Harvard, et al. (and maybe even Reed), are at least as important as the teaching practices employed in any specific classroom.
Second, she frames our country’s educational problems with the following question, “how many potential Nobel Prize winners have written off science before
the end of high school because
their only exposure to the subject had been in test
preparation courses rather than in classes that delved into meaningful
questions?” This is grandstanding of an awful sort. First, I hope you have as much trouble as I did in imagining the path that a child have to take through the first 18 years of life so that his or her “only exposure” to science came through “test preparation courses.” All I could come up with was being raised by wolves and being educated via online Kaplan exam prep courses. The other end of the Stipek’s question is equally ripe. It conjures up an image of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of bright earnest children who are denied a Nobel prize by cruel teaching practices. This is a numerical fantasy. Only one to three people can win a Nobel prize in any topic in any year. Over the course of professional career, the number of deterred prize winners could be as little as zero, and not more than a few hundred. Certainly this editorial had a larger educational problem in mind?
A more realistic, and vastly more humorous, view of what it takes to succeed in science (and possibly win a Nobel) can be found in Adam Ruben‘s excellent article, “Experimental Error: Most Likely to Secede” (Science Careers, Feb 25, 2011). Learning to “put little stickers on several hundred vials” might be off-putting to a lot of future Nobelists, but it’s an essential part of doing good science. Think of it as a sort of test…
