Ever since US President Barack Obama announced the “Educate to Innovate” campaign for Excellence in Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (Stem) Education in November 2009, US educators have launched a number of initiatives to push down Stem education to an earlier and earlier age. Entirely new curricula have been formed, new school programmes have been created and even classic childhood favourites like Sesame Street have been re-thought for Stem careers. The core belief is that if you teach children early, they will embrace Stem disciplines and maybe even turn into Stem super kids.
But will all this focus on creating Stem super kids actually pay off?
If by “pay off,” we mean creating the basis for an innovation economy, then it almost certainly will. Just about everyone agrees that pushing down Stem education to an earlier and earlier age works — and may be the only way for America to preserve its innovation lead in the global economy. This makes intuitive sense — children who get a jump-start on Stem education early in their educational lives will probably be more attuned to Stem careers later in their educational lives. And, anecdotally, we are already starting to hear about Stem super kids as young as 13 years old being courted by the likes of Apple and other tech companies. There are now $1,000 (Dh3,678) 3D printers that show up in Stem gift guides for children. There are all kinds of robotics and engineering kits for the Pre-K crowd. Kids as early as age 5 can now practice designing circuit boards. If only a fraction of these Stem super kids go into future Stem careers, that still goes a long way towards addressing the Stem skills gap that everyone is talking about.
However, if by “pay off,” we mean simply closing the achievement gap with the nations of Europe and Asia, then the evidence is much more ambiguous. According to the latest Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) test results from 2012, US Stem test scores have not budged since the announcement of the “Educate to Innovate” campaign five years ago. In fact, America now appears to be falling behind countries such as Poland and Ireland when it comes to math and science scores. Not to mention the fact that China is now No 1 in the world.
When the Stem education campaign was launched in 2009, Obama suggested a ten-year window for evaluating the results. Since America is now at the midway point, it is fair to ask how far the US has come in the past five years. If educators do not start producing better test results by the time the next round of Pisa test results come out in 2015, the risk is that all those tablet apps and 3D printers and robotics kits will start to look like just shiny and expensive toys. What is the good of a $1,000 3D printer if children still cannot figure out what to do with it? (Those Pisa scores are supposed to measure “practical” skills and not “theoretical” skills).
As long as the stories about poor US test results continue to gain traction (and headlines), it will be harder for the truly unique Stem programmes out there to maintain or gain momentum. It is not just the Science Fair at the White House. It is the Lego racing cars that seven-year-olds are building. It is the Stem camps dedicated to nanotechnology and robotics. It includes all the effort that has gone into rethinking classic childhood favourites.
The Boston Children’s Museum, which now offers a full guide to Stem education for children, in partnership with WGBH and National Grid, probably has the best advice for how to think about Stem: Just get children curious about science and the rest will fall into place. Constantly find ways to stimulate that curiosity. Do not worry about test results, worry more about taking your children for a long walk in the park and getting them interested in what they see all around them. That is when they will be able to create the innovations of tomorrow.
And that is a strategy that seems to make sense. America’s foreign competitors, to be fair, want to be as much like Americans as Americans want to be like them. If the choice is between (a) having innovation clusters like Silicon Valley and middle-of-the-pack test scores or (b) having top-of-the-pack test scores and a second-rate innovation economy as in China, the choice is clear. So let America not fall into the trap of solely measuring success by metrics like test scores. Let it instead focus on all the intangibles of innovation — companies started, apps created, unique science fair experiments conducted and most importantly, dreams fulfilled — for judging the future success of a nation’s Stem programmes for children.
— Washington Post
