Teenage Scientific Illiteracy Prompts Concern

A recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has disturbed many because it ranks United States teenagers as a mere 29th in science literacy as compared to teenagers from around the developed world.

The highly respected organization's study, which is done every three years, targeted 15 year olds.

Finland's teenagers came in first in the study, which was conducted throughout the 30 member nations of the OECD and utilized the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) educational standards to measure performance.

The report echoes the long-standing concerns of many people, including educators and government leaders, about what they see as the diminishing scientific literacy of American students.

While some analysts don't believe that the results reflect a worsening United States educational, what seems to be happening is that other developed nations are racing ahead of America in their own educational systems' development.

Educators in general have been expressing growing concern over the growing apathy of the typical United States student for quite a while now.

While some critics of such studies say that other nations score higher than the United States because they only measure their elite students, those who are disturbed by the study say that the elitism of nations such as those in Europe has been diminishing and actually they are modeling their educational systems more on the egalitarian one of the U.S.

The greatest concern of those whom the study disturbs tends to be that the innovative capacity and "diagnostic ability" of the average educated American, which used to be far and away the greatest in the world, is what is diminishing in terms of competition most of all, and that is at the same time that more "brainy" professional jobs are needed ever more while manufacturing jobs are diminishing across the developed world in the wake of technological advancements and automation.

Some economists as well as educators have said that the failing of the United States in education is that it is just not doing what it has always done best: leveraging the power of competition to get better results.

These say that the same standards or methodologies cannot be applied to every student of a certain grade and that teachers need to be given incentives to perform better, including significantly differentiated compensation. They cite No Child Left Behind as a harmful program because it totally ignores both of those concepts.

The people that this journalist talks to express a wide range of concerns about education in the U.S.

One of their most prominent concerns is what so many see as the diminished role of parents in their children's education, especially in the pre-Kindergarten years.

Another prominent concern, which this journalist admits that he is in complete agreement with, is that subjects like mathematics and science are taught very, very poorly, and students might need to have their parents seek out tutors in some situations in order to have these more abstract subjects taught to them in accord with their personal way of understanding something lest they give up on those subjects.

There is also great concern expressed by the public about teacher training in general. It seems to many people that a future teacher obtaining a Master of Educational Philosophy should not be as important as future teachers mastering certain subjects as PhDs do, so that they can teach in depth. People are also concerned about teachers' ability to think and teach creatively, and point out that there is a lot of creativity involved in scientific endeavors in the real world.