Speaking of education today and John Hood yesterday, I refer again to the book Our Best Foot Forward by quoting:
The bottom line is that major deficiencies remain in the quality of our human capital. According to the 2011 NAEP, only 37 percent of North Carolina’s 8th graders are proficient in math. The news gets worse from there: 31 percent of our 8th graders are proficient in reading, and just 26 percent are proficient in science. A quarter of North Carolina students lack even basic math and reading skills, and 39 percent lack a basic understanding of science.
In other words, kids should steer away from coursework teaching basic skills and scientific method. Should they learn the arcane arts, they will be less attractive to prospective employers who wouldn’t know good science if it bit them. These are they who tell the mathematician, “Throw some equations together to make a graph that shows [our product] goes like this.” This causes the mathematician to have a coronary, and, being a mathematician, he is most-likely under-insured; so the whole affair will induce negative impacts on the bottom lines of public safety nets, and so on.
