On Jan 1, 2004, at 8:51 AM, Tyler Durden wrote:
I'll tell you a story.
Back in the late 1980s I taught at a notorious HS in Bedford Stuyvesant. 90% of my students were black. I regarded few of them as stupid, but almost none of them saw the point of studying math...they just didn't see how it could benefit them, and they said this to me on a regular basis.
First, please stop including the full text of the message you are replying to. Learn to use an editor, whether you ultimately top-post or bottom-post to edited fragments. Second, we are fast-moving toward a society and economy where only those who _wanted_ to study math and science by the time they were in high school will have anything more than a menial, makework job. Now whether they go the full course and get a college degree or advanced degree is not so much the point as it is that they were intrinsically interested. So if a kid in high school can't see the "benefit" of studying math, he shouldn't be. It's as simple as that. The parallel I like is one we developed (in Ted Kaehler's nanotechnology study group in the early 90s) for looking at what a society and economy might look like where the costs of material production are as close to zero as one might imagine. That is, a society with full-blown general assemblers, i.e., von Neumann replicators at the molecular, mechano-synthesis, Drexler-type scale. How would goods be produced and sold? How would markets exist/ The analogy I drew, in an essay, and that Howard Landman, Ted Kaehler, Mike Korns, and others added to was this: * We already have an example of an entire town and an entire industry where essentially the costs of material production are nearly zero. * Namely, Hollywood. Film stock is essentially free...bits even more so. Cameras remain expensive, but are vastly less so than they were a decade ago. Basically, everything material in Hollywood is nearly free. What is expensive is the creative talent, the know-how, the ensembles of actors and directors and writers and all. (And writing is itself a perfect example of material abundance. All of the money is in the writing and distribution, virtually none of it in the materials, or in the low skill segment.) Which is why some writers and some Hollywood types make tens of millions a year and most don't. * The society we are heading towards is one of an increasingly sharp division between the "skilled and in demand" end of the spectrum and the bulk of droids who have few skills in demand. (I argued this, circa 1991-2, to a bunch of people who basically bought the line that technology would bring wealth to the masses, blah blah. I argued that yes, the masses would have great material goods, just as the masses today have color tvs in their cribs. But the big money would elude them. Libertarian rhetoric about everybody being wealthy is only meaningful in the sense that even the poorest today are wealthy by Roman or Middle Ages or even Renaissance standards. But the split between those with talents in demand--the Peter Jacksons, the Stephen Kings, the Tim Berners-Lees, etc. and the "reading be for whitey" and "I don't see any benefit to studying math" vast bulk will widen.) Much more could be said on this. I recall I wrote some long articles along these lines in the early years of the list. In conclusion, your Bedford-Stuy student who doesn't see the point to studying math will never be a math researcher, or a physicist, or a chemist, or anything else of that sort. So no point in trying to convince him to study his math. It's like convincing a kid to start writing so he'll stand a chance of being the next Stephen King: if he needs convincing, he won't be. The burnoff of useless eaters will be glorious. --Tim May