A Science Education 'Manhattan Project'

A while back Tom Friedman wrote an excellent piece (Losing Our Edge?) on the crisis the US is facing by continuing to slip behind the industrial world in science, math, and engineering education. His proposal - kill two birds with one stone by launching a 'Manhattan Project' to develop a hydrogen-based economy. This will both stimulate education and solve our oil dependency problem. My thoughts:

This clearly is not a problem we can just throw money at or solve through incremental efforts such as No Child Left Behind. A motivated, collective effort to maintain our global leadership in education and technology will depend upon the cultural will to do so – we cannot catch up with Japan and China in the number of scientists and engineers we are graduating unless we get students to choose those majors.

I think step one in a 'Manhattan Project' is to have our political leadership acknowledge and call attention to the challenge at hand and put it on par with the war on terror on the national priority list since in the long run, the consequences of failure are just as dire, if not more so.

Step two of the Project (an extension of step one) is to crystallize an objective that to many is currently nothing more than an abstraction – it is one thing to give a speech talking about the need to improve our primary education system, it is quite another to call on Americans to beat our archetypal villain to the Moon. Wrap it in the flag and ask Americans to make the sacrifice and commitment shown possible in past daunting challenges like WWII, the space race, and the war on terror. Make it a matter of patriotism, because really, it is.

The challenge should be meaningful, concrete, measurable, and capable of invoking both passion and fear. Personally, I think the most logical candidate is the pressing task we face in figuring out how to wean the country off our oil dependency (although this is also probably the least likely to ever fly with the current Administration); I also think China is an ideal candidate to replace the Soviet Union as our main 'competitor/villain'.

Step three is to figure out the tactical roadmap of engaging the country in the Project. I think a really powerful and interesting way to make this real for our schools and students is to create a national program of distributed research (in the model of the distributed computing initiatives such as SETI), instead of only looking to our universities for research.

The NSF or some other oversight body could break down and define the research needs that the various primary and secondary school systems in the country can take on depending on their respective capabilities. For example, middle school chemistry classes could experiment with hydrogen-producing electrolysis techniques, high school electronics classes could experiment with optimal engine timing circuits, etc. We could design the curricula of K-12 and our undergraduate programs to focus on both teaching the fundamentals and being relevant to the Project. Not all of the research needs to be necessarily groundbreaking – the point is to engage the students, making them part of a national endeavor, while teaching them about science and technology so that some day, if not during their pre-collegiate education, they will be able to contribute new knowledge and technology to our society.

I think we should also tie the national student research endeavor to goal-based incentives. For example, for every student and/or team a school fields in the Intel International Science Fair (or Westinghouse, or any other national or international competition), the government will provide financial incentives to the schools and students ( e.g. scholarships); for every team that makes it to the regional finals, they get additional funding, etc. This provides a simple impetus for the schools to become proactively involved in the effort. We could also raise the profile of and expand initiatives like USA Today's annual top student lists.

The government could also make a commitment to creating national contests geared towards both students and the public at-large to fulfill knowledge and technology needs, like NASA's current contest for a new spacesuit glove.

I also think there is a place for initiatives like No Child Left Behind, but the way that specific program is currently structured, it is only providing penalties as a motivator. I think it would be much more powerful if we set bold objectives like becoming #1 in each field assessed by the TIMMS. If anything, Americans understand competition drives excellence – if we make it a matter of national pride to best our international peers, I think we will engage communities (which are much more powerful than the schools alone) to a far greater extent than any program that threatens to take away education funding based on national test score benchmarks.

And while I think the aforementioned will help create the cultural commitment to developing the interest and skills of students critical to this effort, we obviously have to also have an apparatus in place to capitalize on having the talent by making pure research a priority of the government, a position well articulated by Vinton Cerf in the Wall St. Journal.

We also need an honest intellectual dialog about where we want to set our national priorities. The best example is biomedical research. I think our leaders are letting us down when their primary guide in setting policy is religion. For example, we need to admit the fact that our current policy on stem cells is driving the best American talent to other countries that will capitalize both medically and economically from the research and as a nation, and then make a collective informed decision based on the reality of the situation. But now I am starting to digress from the original topic.

How do we implement this? I am not sure - the initiative is cleary going to need to come from somewhere else than our current political leadership. I do think a grass-roots unified message and proposal coming from the leaders of the science and technology communities and supported by the public could be a powerful impetus for change. This petition is a good start.