SCIE6664S-1 What's Our Sputnik?

I am old enough to remember watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon when I was nearly 5 years old.  I remember my mother sitting in front of our black and white television while my father played with the rabbit ears trying to get a better picture.  I was not old enough to understand the tension in the room as fear and pride were the emotions at war with each other.  Fear because my parents understood there were no guarantees that Armstrong would survive the lunar landing, walking on the moon, or getting off the moon.  There were no certainties.  Pride in that Armstrong was an American, and we were the first, and to this point only, nation to put a man on the moon.  Armstrong's moonwalk, as well as subsequent trips to the moon, was a culmination of the race to space generated when Russia launched Sputnik in 1957. Our schools kicked into high gear pushing mathematics and science in order to beat the Russians into space, and we were successful.

I am not sure when the push for education stopped being a priority.  Many students today struggle with basic reading and writing.  Where did we as educators and as a nation go wrong?  Was it when we entered a time when making our children feel good about themselves became more important than making sure they had the educational skills necessary to proceed to the next grade level? Perhaps it was when we pushed whole language rather than teaching phonics.   Friedman (2010) discusses the peace breakthrough between Taiwan and China saying Taiwan "got rich by asking: 'How do I improve myself?' Not by declaring: "It's all somebody else's fault.  Give me a handout.'" America is a country with people full of excuses and looking for handouts.  There is no personal responsibility anymore.  How did we let this happen?

What is it going to take to make education important again?  Mandatory state testing is not the answer.  We as educators need to find ways to make education interesting to our students--to make them understand education is worth pursuing.  Friedman is correct when he comments that China is our economic partner and competitor. He hopes China's economic rise will have the same result on education as Sputnik did 56 years ago when we rallied as a nation to become "better educated, more productive, more technologically advanced and more ingenious" (Friedman, 2010) than Russia, our then competitor.
We need a catalyst to propel us forward again.  STEM education is a start.  STEM education will assist our students in becoming problem solvers and communicators.  By incorporating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in everyday problems, perhaps we can get our students to see the benefits and the need for real education. We need to create higher expectations for all of our students and refuse to water down the curriculum or teach to the test.

It is unfortunate that our nation can find money to send to any country in need, but we cannot properly fund our schools.  We can send our politicians all over the world to work out other counties' problems, but we cannot fix our own country.  Taiwan has the answer--we need to move from blaming others and expecting handouts to asking how to improve ourselves.  If we want to be the top country in the 21st century and beyond, we need to make education our top priority.

References
Friedman, T. L. (2010, January 17). What’s our Sputnik? [Op-Ed]. The New York Times [Late Edition (East Coast)], p. WK.8. Retrieved from the Walden University Library using the ProQuest Central database.