Guest Editorial:
Reflections on the Current State of
Education in America
By Chancellor Matthew
Goldstein, The City University of New York
When I reflect on the current state of education in our country today, I see a
very alarming trend: I see fewer students enrolling and succeeding in the
disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). I have
a few thoughts about why this is happening, and how we might address it.
I believe that too few
students are enticed early enough by the beauties of physical and mathematical
phenomena. Too many are “scared off” by the accurate perception that these
disciplines are difficult. We are not sufficiently engaging America’s young
people in these studies and preparing them for the advanced learning and
accomplishment that our nation requires for our future economic health and
security.
Perhaps you saw Thomas
Friedman’s recent editorial in The
New York Times. In that column, Mr. Friedman described his
experience attending this year’s Commencement at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. “For a moment,” he wrote, “as the foreign names kept coming…I
thought that the entire class of doctoral students in physics were going to be
Chinese….” Friedman warned that “we can’t keep being stupid about these things.
You can’t have a world where foreign-born students dominate your science
graduate schools, research labs, journal publications and can now more easily
than ever go back to their home countries to start companies—without it
eventually impacting our standard of living….”
So we simply must get more of
our students hooked on these fields. Early.
I suggest that we all think
about some new work, work that was in fact recently highlighted in Education Update,
from the eminent psychologist Howard Gardner. In his new book Five Minds for the
Future, Dr. Gardner poses a big question: What minds should we be
cultivating in our young people, what kinds of minds will they need if they
(and our society) “are to thrive in the world during the eras to come”?
I am struck by his
formulation of five mind “types”: the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind,
the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind. Of course, all
these minds need cultivating; I certainly hope that on the postsecondary level,
we’re doing exactly that work at CUNY. But when I think of the discouraging
trend I’ve just cited, two of Dr. Gardner’s “minds” assume added importance:
the disciplined mind, and the creating one.
A disciplined mind learns the
ways of thinking that we associate with the major disciplines (Dr. Gardner
singles out mathematics, science, history, and “at least one art form”). And a
disciplined mind, Dr. Gardner suggests, is an active and creative one: “Once one has understood well a
particular play, a particular war, a particular physical or biological or
managerial concept, the appetite has been whetted for additional and deeper
understanding, and for clear-cut performances in which one’s understanding can
be demonstrated to others and to oneself. Indeed, the genuine understander is
unlikely in the future to accept only superficial understandings. Rather,
having eaten from the tree of understanding, he or she is likely to return
there repeatedly for ever more satisfying intellectual nourishment.”
This vital intellectual curiosity establishes a bridge to the “creating
mind” that seeks new work, new standards, new questions, new answers. The
creating mind is a mind like that of Albert Einstein, whose success as a
theorist, as Walter Isaacson has observed in a new biography, “came not from
the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and
creativity.”
We need young Americans to “have it all”: They need the disciplinary
knowledge associated with mathematics and the sciences, and they need the
imagination and creativity too often missing from rote learning. It’s a lot to
ask of those responsible for teaching them, but it simply must be done.#
