Cristina Odone is not happy that her daughter is required to take science and math classes — and it’s all those damned feminists pressuring girls to go into STEM fields. She thinks it isn’t right that, under the British system, kids are required to take a couple of GCSEs in the sciences.
Now this is where my Americanism gets in the way — I’m unfamiliar with the British system, so I had to do a little digging to relate her complaint to the American system I understand. GCSEs are qualifications that demonstrate basic understanding of a subject — students take exams, after a couple of years of coursework, when they’re about 16 years old, in a collection of subjects, some of which are required, and others which are elective. They’ll typically get 8-10 GCSEs.
Speak up, readers from the UK, if I’m getting any of this wrong!
In the US, we don’t have any qualifying exams — instead, we have state standards that design a general curriculum for our high schools. To get a diploma, students are expected to take and pass a series of courses in subjects like earth science or algebra or English or history. There are also recommended, somewhat more rigorous courses that it is suggested that students take if they want to go on to college. When I was in high school, for instance, I took the recommended college track, which included more math and science and two years of a foreign language than was required for graduation. I didn’t have to take an exam at the end of a sequence of courses, just pass each course along the way, so the British system is a bit more demanding.
But the point is that in both systems, and as a general rule in good education everywhere, students are expected to take courses that they might otherwise avoid: to be properly educated, one should have some exposure, at least, to diverse subjects, such as your language, a foreign language, world and local history, some basic math and science, and there should also be an opportunity to explore in greater depth subjects that students find appealing. So maybe a student really wants to do nothing but theater…but they should also know a little geometry and physics. The math nerd may want to just do calculus, and hates the performing arts…but it would be good for them to take a communications class.
We continue this practice at the university level. We have a required core in a subject, and distribution requirements that force students to take classes outside of their comfort zone. When advising students, I get a lot of annoyed people (especially the pre-meds) who just want to take physiology and genetics and molecular biology, and hate the fact that we also require them to take history or sociology or psychology. I suspect that faculty across campus have to deal with students peeved at having to meet the university requirement to take a science course in order to graduate.
I have little patience for people, like Odone, who want to demand that their little girl be sheltered from the breadth of education. It is fine that her daughter wants a career that’s more literary; Odone seems to think that expecting her daughter to take math courses at the age of 15 is the same as shoe-horning her into a lifetime of soldering and pouring things into flasks. But let’s get real: the stuff you learn at 14, 15, or 16 isn’t the detailed knowledge of the subject that you’ll need to go on to a career. It’s the general basics that are broadly applicable to many subjects.
I’ve seen this over and over: being able to cross-fertilize ideas is incredibly helpful. In high school, my daughter was really into theater, especially theater tech; understanding math and programming was important. I’ve been impressed with the art department at my university — did you know that chemistry is a good thing to know for artists? I was just listening to an episode of Radiolab in which a medieval historian and a microbiologist teamed up to evaluate a medicine described in an old manuscript. So, please, don’t try to tell me that you know exactly what narrow range of human knowledge ought to be dispensed to your daughter. She might surprise you.
But Odone goes even further, from promoting ignorance and tall tales of conspiracies by feminists to lock her daughter into an engineered future because she has to take a few math courses, into full-blown offensive stupidity.
She tries to suggest that literature makes everyone happier.
J K Rowling, say, strikes me as a lot happier and more successful than Alan Turing, the tortured mathematics genius who took his own life.
My dog, but that’s stupid. Alan Turing was unhappy because people, anti-homosexual prudes like the Catholic church Odone so loves, criminalized his sexuality and chemically castrated him. It wasn’t because he was tortured by math or his genius. He would have been even more miserable if they’d taken his mathematics away from him. And he was also a polymath who applied his ideas more broadly than just to computer science — developmental biologists are familiar with his work, because he applied it to morphogenesis and pattern formation.
And then Odone goes even further.
Attempts are being made to remedy this. Elizabeth Truss, the former education minister, has warned against “science deserts”, while Wise, the campaign run by the Engineering Council with the Equal Opportunities Commission to promote girls’ take-up of sciences and maths, wants at least one million more women in the UK Stem force.
This sounds laudable. But to a girl such as Izzy with a literary bent, this focus on STEM subjects sends a message that makes her (and me) uncomfortable: doing a man’s work is more impressive than doing a woman’s.
I can’t help thinking that this denigrates women’s achievements. Maybe the time has come to discard the straitjacket of compulsory science GCSEs. I believe we should free girls to choose the subjects they are passionate about rather than force them to boost productivity or Britain’s ranking in the STEM-obsessed indices.
Science is a “man’s work”? Jebus. She begins her essay by talking about her son, who read English at Oxford. How would she if we characterized that as doing “woman’s work”? I have one son who was an English major in college; another who was a political science and economics major; and a daughter who is a computer science student. I oppose any attempts to stereotype professions by gender — we should allow students to pursue their passions no matter what their sex.
But that does not mean that we should wedge education into narrow pigeonholes where kids are able to specialize to a ludicrous degree at an early age, or where meddlesome parents feel they are entitled to protect their kids from the horrors of mathematics or art history.
By the way, I found that Radiolab episode mildly annoying. It’s trivial to find an antibiotic that kills bacteria; the trick is finding one that doesn’t also kill you. You could, I suppose, treat a staph infection with megadoses of pure ethanol, but it’s not a good choice for general health.
For once, I can answer with a resounding “Yes, I know that!”
Oh FFS. I had a literary bent in HS, and catered to it as much as possible. I loved all my lit classes and studies. Somehow or another, I also managed to enjoy my biology and chem courses, too. Gad. Izzy’s mum isn’t doing her any favours, making sure there’s a distinct and idiotic divide between ‘womens’ work and mens’ work’.
I usually think about ignorance in terms of being vulnerabilities. There are many, many people out there quite willing to take advantage of people’s ignorance. Anything from advertising shampoos created using “molecular technology” (i.e. chemistry), to phony cancer cures. If we don’t know our history, people with political motivations can “explain” to us what our founding fathers really believed and/or said. If we are poor at math, we can be taken advantage of in terms of our finances.
If you don’t get a well-rounded education, you are vulnerable.
Early specialization is a problem in a lot of areas. Even in athletics, kids are now being encouraged to try and stick with several sports right through high school rather than getting too involved with, say, just baseball or just handegg (American “football”).
There are several reasons for this beyond just the need for the well-rounded education PZ is advocating. Early specialization can lead to burnout, and if that happens, the burnee is left with nothing else they feel good at.
She must never have encountered the trope of the melanchoic and desperate poet…
I am against “drop out of everything young”. My German state swings the pendulum a bit too far in the other direction and forces everybody to do Maths, German and 1 Foreign Language on an advanced level until your final state wide exams. It used to be that you had a broader range of choices on what to take at an advanced level and what not. I, for example, took German, English and Economics with Biology being my 4th exams subject. Other subjects I had to take were Maths, Art/Music, Religious Education/Ethics, PE, and another Social Science (history in my case).
The goal, in all German states, is to have a “general ability to study in college”. Which makes sense. At 15 you’Re not a particularly good judge of what might be the best college subject for you. IIRC I wanted to emigrate to Canada and become a Mountie at that age. So you give kids a broad education that gives everybody the tools they need in college. Previous knowledge is often used up very quickly anyway once college classes are picking up space. I never took any Spanish before I started college, but those who’d studied Spanish in school already didn’t have a big advantage. After a year or so we were all on the same level.
sounds like a quota there. surely opposing quotas is laudable, eh? yet to do so with a bad argument is laffable.
The JKRowling v Turing argument seems to be based on “first glance” looks at their lives. If reading is so valuable, read a little about those two people. JKR may seem happy, yet, look a little closer. Is she? As for Turing, without getting all book bound, try The Imitation Game movie to get a little more oversight of why Turing was miserable. As a MIT undergrad, most of us struggled with “irrelevant” humanities course requirements as being just requirements but totally irrelevant to our future careers. Yet, once “out in the world”, discovered it was necessary to talk to people non-technically, that proposals for projects had to be written in language other than pure mathmatics [sic].
It is also being published (ref unavailable) that music performance has profound effect on all aspects of cognition, such as math, etc. Diversity applies in all forms of the word. Not just diverse population of multiple people collaborating, also diverse set of skill within each person, providing resources to provide unanticipated avenues to a solution to a problem. There is value to focus, but also drawbacks to too tight a focus. (lasers are a quite focused form of light, and are quite useful as such, but as such can also be quite dangerous).
re @6:
html fail: only one word “seem” was to have been embolded, the rest was to be plain. apologies
I’ve overheard many engineering students in the past complain about having to take English courses in college. The typical gripe was “I’ll give my report to the secretary, and she will make in comprehensible”. About this time, personal computers were being set on desktops everywhere. Bye-bye departmental secretary. Then they had to make their reports comprehensible to people who did not have a large technical background.
I also found that the distribution requirement anthropology courses helped in deal with multi-national research groups.
You never know when some bit of knowledge may come in useful.
Nerd, I heard the same complaint with no expectation of the secretary doing your work for you. It has nothing to do with someone else doing it, it has to do with being forced to do something that isn’t your passion.
Basically, it’s hard when you know so little to understand how much there is to know.
While I am sympathetic to the author’s complaint that work done by women, and areas of study largely populated by women, are devalued, that is precisely the sort of thing feminism works to address. One cannot solve disdain for humanities by insisting that girls who are interested in humanities shouldn’t have to take math because that’s men’s work. That’s.. that’s the whole problem. You can’t fix a problem by doubling down on the very sorts of attitudes which created it to begin with.
Also known as “life” to the majority of people. It’s usually the complaint of a very pampered sort of middle class folks, predominantly male, but not exclusively. They were being told all their lives that “their education” was the only thing that mattered and who had the good fortune of being able to do what was their passion. While somebody else cooked and cleaned, of course.
If I had to take P.E., then they have to take STEM, DAMMIT !
Fair is fair.
I’m not too familiar with GCSEs, but the broad idea in the UK is indeed that you are confronted with a range of subjects, essentially the school version of ‘everything’. But once you have your GCSEs and do decide to carry on with A-levels to eventually go to university, you can, as far as I know, choose what to do without any restrictions whatsoever, at least technically speaking. You choose four subjects which are taught at a much higher level than GCSE and even drop one of those after the first year.
Usually students pick their A-levels based on what they want to study at university. Prep for university admission starts right out of the gate and universities tend to have very specific requirements for both subjects and grades. If I recall correctly, STEM-courses seemed to be particularly choosy, demanding maths, the subject-specific science and, quite often, another science subject on top of that. So for aspiring STEM-students it wouldn’t be unusual to have a STEM-only curriculum long before even getting to university. Naturally, the subject to be dropped would be the one with the worst grade because you have to get the best average, interests be damned.
Back in the day I used to appreciate this. I, too, loathed the breadth because I found most subjects uninteresting at best, so the A-levels gave me the opportunity to ditch all that and focus on what I wanted to do.
Looking back I’m not so sure. There are plenty of students who are convinced they want to go into a particular field. Until they get to university, that is, where they find it wasn’t what they were looking for after all. When that’s the case, having a narrow education can seriously trip you up. Especially if you’re dealing with a university that’s very keen on enforcing entry requirements and not so keen on people having second thoughts and other interests. Which is, again if I recall correctly, virtually all of them in the UK.
I started out as an art major in college, I finished with a degree in Anthropology and now I’m an airline pilot. You never know where life will lead you sometimes and what you are interested in now may change. Getting a broad education not only is valuable in that respect but also because she is going on to be a voter later in life and it would be nice if people had some idea how to evaluate bullshit.
The notion that literary types are happy and science/engineers are unhappy is just plan offensive to me. Im a depressive kind of person by nature but my science brings me one of the greatest joys in life. I’m completely tone deaf on literature and a good fiction book has rarely inspired me to feel anything. On the other hand, music is the second great joy in my life, while the intersection of nature, gardening and design could be considered a third.
I don’t think this is particularly unusual and if any young women felt the same way as I do, why on earth would her mother invalidate this? Because, to be honest, I think it is perfectly normal (even right) to consider the 19th century English novelists and poets as largely pompous and pathetic people – Dickens aside. And I have 10 pounds sterling that says this is exactly the education that Ms. Odone wants for her daughter… because it is all she can care about herself. A bit like all those 19th century literary types.
It’s really odd that the author invokes Rowling, given that Rowling explicitly sets out to depict an educational system that is strongly merit-based yet egalitarian (well, for humans, anyway). While the social part of the system can be seen as being problematical (House rivalry; a little too much emphasis on sport; bias against humanoid nonhumans), at no point does Rowling suggest that one gender or the other is “better” at any given set of skills, or that increasing one’s knowledge by way of the schooling system is somehow an inherently bad thing for any particular group of people.
And she wrote her male protagonist as less intellectually impressive than one of his female friends.
Hermione Granger would give these sentences such a look.
In the UK they are working to revamp their IT education programs, moving away from teaching the kids how to use all aspects of MS Office towards actually understanding what computers are and do. The Raspberry Pi is intended for that, though that device is independent of the curriculum changes.
As a practical matter, I ran into a nice young man (mid-20s? 30?) yesterday whose lab partner is using a Raspberry Pi to collect data from detectors in a cryogenic dark matter search, so the Pis have uses well beyond kids and education.
At least in the US, the push for STEM (or historical equivalent) blows hot and cold. The earliest such push I actually recall was right after Sputnik I went up and everyone was in a tizzy to encourage the kids interested in science and math because we “needed to catch up with the Russians!” After the panic died down, things went back to “normal” and the jocks were the darlings of school admins again. Repeat over the decades.
@mykroft #3:
And if we don’t understand probability and statistics, we can be fleeced day after day and manipulated from the cradle to the grave.
Giliell@11:
Any stats to back that up? The groups I hear it from most often are (a) business people who figure that education is about teaching their workers the precise skills they need so that they can be effective on day 1 with no training and thus should get rid of all that bullshit beyond [whatever skill they happen to need that day, which is likely to be obsolete next year], then (b) the poorer socioeconomic classes who figure they don’t need education at all to be a cook, then (c) university students unhappy about being forced to adult.
That last category are mostly women these days — by a ratio of 57:43 in Canada.
Ah yes, because that Sylvia Plath was such a cheerful old sausage thanks to her literary pursuits…
Math is a tool, but it also establishes how to analyze and solve problems. It teaches how to look at a situation, how to extract relevant information, how to organize it, how to logically proceed step by step, and how to recognize the solution once it is reached. It is, in my opinion, one of the most important skill any person will ever learn in their life, even if you never factor a polynomial or prove the Power Rule ever again.
Whining that her daughter is being taught “too much” math and science is like whining that your child is becoming too capable of being a productive citizen in a democracy.
#20 – probably a feminist though! 4
Odone is a Catholic so its all grist to the mill.
So if they were to try to address any problems regarding a low proportion of minorities in STEM subjects, then they’re sending the message that doing white people’s work is more impressive than doing black people’s work?
Respect: you’re doing it wrong.
numerobis
You’re conflating two things. One is the original argument about not having to learn X, the other one is the snippet I commented on, which was people complaining about having to do things that are not “their passion”. Very few people have the luxory to care about their passion.
“University students being forced to adult” is a predominantly white and middle class group. As I said, it’s predominantly men, not exclusively. There’s lots of pampered middle class female college students as well. But yes, statistics do demonstrate that girls still do more chores at home (while boys are more likely to get paid and to get paid more), so they’re much more used to “adult” than boys when they start college.
You know, I just think of all the books I’ve read by authors who show an obvious interest in science and math as seeds for story. Not just the usual suspects of science fiction, either. Fantasy author N K Jemisin apparently found a seminar taught by NASA as quite useful for story seeds. I’ve also seen Mary Robinette Kowal work knowledge of light (and its effects on microbes) into the magic she writes about in her historical fantasy.
Never mind that any resident of a country is expected to make judgements on things like ‘does this really cure cancer’ or ‘can I trust politicians when they claim to be ‘climate change skeptics’.
As for anecdotes, I teach physics and am pretty content with my life. I’m not going to be JK Rowling rich but if I can stay out of Adjunct Hell, I can do pretty well for myself. (And all those English and communication skills are handy; I wish I knew more, and would certainly tell my past middle-school self to pay attention and do her writing homework.) A friend of mine occasionally bemoans that she was so focused on being the next Steven King as a teenager that she didn’t pay attention to her science and math classes. Now that her interest has shifted to science, she doesn’t have the finances or mental health to pursue it. This isn’t to say that science makes one happier than writing, but that:
1. People’s happiness can be independent of their career. Turing’s problems weren’t due to computer science, but being gay in a society that didn’t accept that. My friend still would have had mental illness severe enough to put her on disability (and meds that come with some potent side effects), even if she had been a physics major.
2. Some people know what they want at age 15*. Some people don’t. While you got to specialize at some point, maybe 15 is a bit early.
3. Even for folks who do want to specialize, having a broad base skill set is good for both their professions and their lives outside their profession. A fiction writer should know a wide amount of things, because anything could be a story seed. A journalist should know a bit about the subjects she writes about to ask intelligent questions and fact-check. A scientist or engineer better know how to write and communicate to peers, students and bosses, or their science and math is useless.
* I sort of did. I didn’t anticipate loving teaching so much, though. I thought I’d want to be a pure researcher who taught because that was what let me do research at a university.
This is somewhere the education system does differ in the UK – it specialises earlier and more thoroughly. GCSEs are the last stage of compulsory education. Those that continue to A-levels (age 16-18) will probably be required to do a fairly light General Studies course, but can otherwise pick the courses they like. At uni, you apply to do a particular one or two subjects, and there’s no requirement, or often even opportunity to study outside of that.
Owlmirror, actually Rowling depicts a sexist world where the best a girl can do is recite information and at best apply existing knowledge in new ways, but true innovation that expands the base of knowledge is done by boys – the Marauders and Severus Snape. (Of course in the Potterverse the main use of innovation is to find original ways to hurt people hilariously rather than to improve lives.)
@anat, #27:
I think the books may well have some implicit sexism (and other biases), but I don’t see how “apply existing knowledge in new ways” is really that different from “true innovation”. Hermione is intelligent, creative, and heroic; she does far more than just “recite information”.
Come to think of it, the Marauders and Snape didn’t expand the base of common knowledge — they kept their innovations for themselves.
Another point that occurred to me is that two of the House founders were women, notably including the one best known for intellectual prowess.
That’s . . . an interesting observation, and critiquing these points would take a re-read of the series that I don’t have time for.
One thought that did occur to me is that it might be possible to make an argument for an implicit gender divide between those who break rules to hurt people, and those who use the system of rules to hurt people — I am thinking here of the Marauders, Snape, Riddle/Voldemort himself, and Fred & George as the rule breakers, and Dolores Umbridge and Rita Skeeter as the rule “users”. But thinking about it, there might be exceptions, which, again, would take close re-reading to articulate.
A major problem with the British and especially the English (Scotland Wales and N.Ireland are slightly different) educational system is that it does force kids to specialise at too young an age. The year following GCSEs they will have to drop down to usually four subjects at “A” level, the results of which are crucial in gaining university entrance so the subjects chosen generally have to reflect what you intend to study at uni. For someone intending to do a science or engineering degree, this would normally mean dropping all liberal arts subjects.. Any attempts to try and broaden the curriculum post 16 are shouted down by conservatives like Odone.
Thankfully, at least for the time being a reasonably broad curriculum is available up to sixteen, though it seems as if she would like to destroy that as well.
If she loves reading and writing so much, how come she misspells her own name?
Joke aside, is there a link to her essay somewhere in the OP that I’m missing?
@zibble (#30):
Not that I see, so here you go: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/11978621/My-daughter-shouldnt-have-tostudy-science-says-Cristina-Odone.html
I detested learning foreign languages and history in highschool and I loathed typewriting. I wanted to study the sciences and visual arts, because I liked those, but I thought that I shall never need languages or writing with all ten fingers.
With the emergence of personal computer, the fall of the iron curtain and globalisation all of those skills I acquired de-facto against my will are pretty damn important and I am more than happy to have them on my CV. Because while it is my knowledge of math and natural sciences that puts the bread on the table strictly speaking, I can put it to use only due to my knowledge of two other languages because where I live there is nowadays no market for lab technician who does know only one language.
I know a woman whom I had to help to learn chemistry in her thirties, when she was learning qualification for a new job. She loathed chemistry in highschool just as I loathed languages, and was just as much convinced she will never need it. Now the sciences put the bread on her table too.
We have a saying “Kolik řečí umíš, tolikrát jsi člověkem.” ~ How many languages you speak, that many times you are a human. I used to sneer at it as a child but exposure to other languages and cultures has learned me its deep thruth. Now I wish whe had similar wise saying along the lines of – how much of science you know… because the general populace is apallingly ignorant about basic statistics and scientific knowledge and this is used and abused by politicians on daily basis.
Under 20 is no age to know and decide what is important for you to know. People are expected to live three to four times that time and you never know where the winds of fate carry you or what they trow in your path. It is always good to have intelectual equivalent of a swiss army knife in your head.
Well the system has changed slightly since I was at high school but I too was of an entirely English literary and art subject bent – but I have GCSE’s in maths, biology, chemistry, physics, French, German, history and computer science – which I am entirely grateful for. Yes, I sat bored in many of those classes but in order to get onto the A levels courses that I wanted I performed well enough to get decent grades and they gave a very basic foundation in some areas up until the age of 16. Now I’ve never gone on to any high science field but I can fall back on some biology and chemistry and physics in discussions with scientists – and they’ve even (shock horror) come in handy for literary and art based projects in my life.
Maybe Izzy doesn’t want to do STEM because her mother has been telling her her whole life that it is men’s work?
Apples and oranges. STEM has the value described elsewhere in the thread, whereas PE’s function is to hamstring attempts at making the population healthier by making most people powerfully associate physical activity with abject misery.
Azkyroth @ 35
It worked for me!
Azkyroth:
I’d say PE is important, especially for a lot of kids who simply don’t have an outlet outside of school. That said, a helluva lot depends on how diverse a PE program is set up to be. I got lucky, in HS, the diversity of PE classes was fantastic, and people could find what they were comfortable with, from many different types of dance, to gymnastics, to archery, to a whole fucktonne of options, and that was outside all the team type sports, which people were free to sign up for as well. And even when it came to team stuff, there was more than baseball / handegg / basketball. I wasn’t much for team sport, but I happily joined the volleyball team, ’cause we had our tournaments at the beach.
Ed Witten has a second Ph.D. It’s in history.
leerudolph @38: Not unless he got it recently. His first degree was a B.A. in history.
Does the Telegraph not have editors or fact-checkers?
Someone who could have informed Odone that the ‘E’ in STEM stands for Engineering not Economics?
I would say that 8-10 GCSEs is a fairly good haul, indicative of someone who should get a place at a good university, rather than ‘typical’ for the whole population, but apart from that, your analysis seems good.
It doesn’t really surprise me that Odone has a narrow view of science; you can look at her character assassination of Evan Harris before the 2010 election to see how much she can hate science when it takes her fancy: http://www.dcscience.net/2010/05/17/a-good-man-defeated-by-poisonous-christians/
What is disappointing, if this ‘think tank’ has any influence (though perhaps her involvement shows it will fail, which might be a good thing, since it seems to have the message ‘greed is good’, and is funded by a Dubai private investment firm), is that she is listed at the end of the article as a director of the Legatum Institute:
“The Legatum Institute is an international think tank and educational charity focused on promoting prosperity. We do this by researching our core themes of revitalising capitalism and democracy. The Legatum Prosperity Index™, our signature publication, ranks 142 countries in terms of wealth and wellbeing.
Through research programmes including Vision of Capitalism, The Culture of Prosperity, Transitions Forum, and the Economics of Prosperity, the Institute seeks to understand what drives and restrains national success and individual flourishing. The Institute co-publishes with Foreign Policy magazine, the Democracy Lab, whose on-the-ground journalists report on political transitions around the world.”
http://www.li.com/about/about-the-legatum-institute
The director of an educational charity, saying children should be able to give up science at age 12? Hopeless.
There are notable differences between the English and Scottish systems — After the GCSE in England, one studies for two years for A-levels. In Scotland, it is one year, with five courses, for a Scottish Certificate of Education, aka “Highers.” One result is that the Scottish university program is a four year program, where one studies for two years in a general field, then specializes with two more years to get an honors degree. The English universities have only one year before the specialization. One must qualify for the specialization, otherwise one can complete a broader ordinary degree, in Scotland it is three years for the ordinary.
Goodness, if you read the whole thing, it becomes worse
The poor girl who is being made the poster girl for mummy’s stupidity is 12*. At 12 yeras old, her mother has decided her path is set in stone and that she needs no more science or economics or maths. I know the level kids are at 12 in those subjects and no, you cannot live with that amount of knowledge. That’s why we generally no longer allow kids that age to drop out of school and start working in the coalmine.
And then there’s the sly mix of actual quotes with “what her feminist friends said”, which actually doesn’t sound a lot like what actual feminists usually say. That a girl going into arts is “betraying the Sufragettes and Marie Curie”? Gimme a break. And that the only role models for girls nowadays are the top scientists and CEOs? Really? There are no more female authors, actors, singers?
I’m under the impession that for Odone anybody mentioning female scientists and mentioning that there’S still a lack of women in STEM is like anybody mentioning that gay people exist: an affront to her personal beliefs.
Clearly, with 7 out of 10 English GCSEs being taken by girls, there’s no need to worry about girls being discouraged from taking them. We can talk about how they’re being seen as “lesser” subjects, and that’s a worthwhile discussion. But I’m drawing a line at letting teenagers or their parents bar them many possible roads in their future by allowing them to get a too narrow education just because they don’t like something as teens.
And then she quotes some actual
*Personally I think there are serious ethical concerns with exposing your child at that age to such a public.
No, almost the whole population will study for and take exams in 8-10 GCSEs, a few will take even more but no-one (except for those with special needs of some kind) will take less.
Because the pass mark is very low, a large majority of the population will pass 8-10 GCSEs as well. However many people look only at “good” grades (A*-C), so while D-G are technically passes they’re not treated that way. And in that case, yes, 8-10 A*-C grades is a pretty good haul.
But that’s irrelevant to the discussion here about the breadth of the curriculum.
Owlmirror:
Another reason that it’s odd: Rowling suffered from depression (pre-Potter, at least). I believe she has written that the Dementors came from that experience. So much for non-STEM happiness!
Gregory in Seattle:
Don’t forget that it’s also beautiful. I got so much enjoyment out of pure mathematics at school. The further it was from any obvious practical application in my life, the more I loved it! So I’m grateful to school for showing me that beauty, regardless of how useful it has been in my adult life.
I’ve noticed an annoying trend for education to be focused purely upon results, rather than on building up a stock of knowledge. People seem to be intent upon learning what they need to pass exams, studying for a narrow career path and discarding anything else. My brother is a particularly spectacular example, despite holding an A level in geography he believed the map used in the board-game Risk was a largely accurate depiction of the worlds’ nation states. Other spectacular moments of ignorance include his thinking Shakespeare wrote Great Expectations (when I told him it was Dickens he asked “so was Dickens after Shakespeare then?”) confusing “eunuch” with “unicorn” and referring to Prince Phillip as “the King.”
This level of ignorance isn’t exactly typical but I do find constant examples of what I like to call ‘Dragden moments’ – displays of ignorance not necessarily spectacular in their own right, but made remarkable by the obvious intelligence and education of the person making them(my brother is a Buddhist monk and this is his ordained name) Some of these include: A trained doctor imagining that if humanity were annihilated tomorrow, libraries would still exist as ruins with their books in readable condition 500 million years later, a PHD researcher in psychology who grew up in Southern England believing Devon was in the lake district, and a news junkie with straight A’s and A stars at GCSE not knowing China was a dictatorship.
[Note: I’m an American in the USA]
I was at a doctor’s appointment recently, and (with my permission) a medical student was observing the appointment, while the doctor asked him questions about my case and so on, to give him practical experience. They were having larger discussions about other related things, including a journal article on a medical topic.
And the student–a guy well into his 20s, at least–was having a hard time with the article, because it didn’t give any concrete answers, but rather just raised ethical questions and discussed hypothetical situations. This poor med student couldn’t grasp the point of it. And into this I said, “That’s what a liberal arts education is about–learning to think about things and come to conclusions.”
The doctor later told me that’s something he finds frustrating about many of the students: they focused so hard on science classes that were taught with a focus of “there is a correct answer and you must find it,” that they aren’t able to deal with uncertainty and analysis. (Two concepts that were taught in science classes when I was in high school and college! What are they teaching these days? Did I get lucky, or are there just a lot of bad schools out there now?)
I’m a bit younger than PZ, but I had a similar high school education (at a specifically college-prep school; 98% of graduates at least entered college). Requirements: 4 years English, 3 years History, 3 years foreign language (could be 2 years if you already had a year coming in), 3 years science, 3 years math, 2 years art, 4 years gym (it was a half-credit course, with broad selections available), 4 years religion/philosophy (also a half-credit course, with broad selections). One of those years of English class included a half-credit of public speaking.
I dumped History senior year because I hated it, and took 2 science classes, English, Calculus, Art, philosophy, and gym. In college, what with one thing and another (a long detour through Engineering which was fine, but ultimately not for me) but because of required courses, I discovered that History is a lot more fun at the college level than high school! And so I have a degree in History. I focused in military history, which used a lot of the skills and thinking-tools I learned in Engineering.
Always make students take a wide selection of classes. They may not know what rocks their world until they’re older. They need the chance to explore everything.
One thing about New York, there’s a thing called a “Regents diploma,” which you get by taking elective state-wide exams in certain fields. My high school wouldn’t graduate anyone who didn’t pass at least three of these exams, and encouraged the students to take all of the ones for which they were eligible. For honors-level classes, this “encouragement” took the form of the Regents exam being your course final, and therefore required.
I recall being 12 in France and being asked what field I wanted to study: vocational or university track, and which vocation or what faculty (sciences or humanities) in university? We were only there for a year, so I actually didn’t need to decide, but all my classmates really did. My parents and I were kind of amazed.
Personally I went to university knowing I wanted to do chemistry but wanted to dally in computer science. I left a computer scientist with a grounding in medieval literature, linguistics, and planetary geology. The planetary + CS bit got me my first job. The single most important class I took was my public speaking class from the theatre department.
I’m not sure how well Rowling would have managed writing all those Quidditch scenes (or even coming up with the concept of the game) without at least a teensy bit of math….
Best to ignore the loony Odone. She’s one of the go to religious nutters for discussion programmes on the telly.
In my corner of Switzerland in the 90’s, compulsory education involved studying Italian (9 years), French (7 years), and German (3 years). English was still only optional, but most people took it. I didn’t, choosing Latin instead in view of entering the “Literary” curriculum in high school.
Over my four years (years 10-14) of “Literary” high school I was required to take classes of maths, physics, chemistry, biology, English (finally!), history, geography, philosophy, music or arts, sports. All of this was part of a common core shared with the other “specialized” high school curricula. What distinguished my “Literary maturity” from, say, a scientific or economic one, was the pick of Latin, plus varying proportions of the core subjects.
I eventually got tired of Latin and went on to study maths and physics at uni. I am now a tenured researcher in pure maths.
I am very grateful for my well-rounded education, and proud that my country takes very seriously the idea that (public! free!) high school should provide a high quality education of a genuinely general kind. Although i hear that now, after a few reforms, there is more early specialization and the bar is set lower.
Oh: I should add, all those languages payed off nicely. My university studies were in German, in Zurich, but I’ve ended up teaching in France — in French, of course. My research-related activities happen mostly in Enlish. Without those three languages (none of which is my native one) I couldn’t have made the studies and the subsequent career that i have.
In British GCSEs, Science is split into Biology, Chemistry and Physics classes, all of which are mandatory at that level. The qualification, however, is (or was ten years ago when I got mine) “Double Science” since the exams and coursework in the three subjects all contribute to a single qualification that is worth two GCSE qualificiations. Which makes me very happy that I earned an A*, the highest grade at the time, in science, because it means I still get to list it twice on my CV.