Yesterday, the 5-year-old bipartisan industry organization TechNet, which was formed to lobby in Washington for national technology and innovation, briefed the National Press Club about its findings that IT in the United States is in danger of losing its competitive edge. Citing TechNet's "Innovation Policy Agenda," Rick White, TechNet president and CEO, said that math, science, and engineering education in the US has been falling and continues to fall behind that of other countries. Combine this with the woeful state of broadband deployment in the US and problems with Internet security, and you have a recipe for, if not outright disaster, then certainly dire straits for IT and the US economy in the not so distant future.
Reading this news as I did upon finishing the article "Who Says a Woman Can't Be Einstein?" in the March 7 issue of Time magazine made me wonder once again why we just can't seem to connect the dots. Yes, the brains of males and females are different. We get it. But difference doesn't mean inferiority in any one area, only that males and females process information differently. Yet we continue to shoehorn schoolkids into a one-size-fits-all educational system that might get the job done--barely--but doesn't seem to really serve any child really well. For example, an interesting insight from the Time article comes from Leonard Sax, a physician and psychologist who's studied the differences between the brains of girls and boys intensively. According to Sax, "The reason women are underrepresented in computer science and engineering is not because they can't do it. It's because of the way they're taught." But if TechNet is correct, it isn't just girls who aren't being taught well in math, technology, and science. We need to demolish the myth that these subjects are difficult and arcane and bring them back into the realm of "ordinary" education and everyday life.
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Join security expert Randy Franklin Smith in this online chat about the Security Event Log. Bring your questions about this event log and come away with answers you can't get from Microsoft. Read more about the chat at InstantDoc ID 45334 . March 16, 4:00 P.M. EST/1:00 P.M. PST.
