Scientists Are Born, Not Made

Correcting the shortage of U.S. engineers means rethinking the way schools teach science, not just increasing funding for classes and teachers

by Greg Blonder

Take a simple, one-word test. Say this word aloud: UNIONIZED. O.K. Test over. How did you pronounce the word? Was it a synonym for organized labor, or were you describing a neutrally charged atom?

Your answer says a lot about you. Select the first pronunciation, and you're likely part of the vast majority of people not pursuing a career in science. Select the latter, you may be among the scientific minority, someone who always felt impelled to discover those few simple laws responsible for our complex and fascinating natural world. My little test is also an illustration, admittedly unscientific, of a fundamental error underpinning our national debate over the impending shortage of U.S. scientists and engineers.

Numerous blue ribbon commissions, such as the one put together by the National Academies, lament this growing shortfall. Their core recommendation is to vastly increase funding for teaching junior and senior high school math, biology, chemistry, and physics. Essentially, this conventional approach maintains our standard science curricula, but advocates smaller classes and more and better-trained teachers.

VICIOUS CYCLE.

Unfortunately, conventional wisdom also incorporates a hidden assumption: that if more kids are exposed to better quality courses, more kids will end up choosing science or engineering as a career. It's a peculiar version of demand-side economics (that "guns can be converted to butter," if the price is right) and one that's palpably false.

Actually we live in a supply-constrained world, where the pool of real scientists and engineers is relatively small and most people, no matter how bright, aren't destined for careers in science and engineering. Worse yet, these few naturally-inclined technologists are being discouraged from following their dream and so switch to other fields, while most other students are bored out of their minds in conventional courses, transferring their academic discouragement to a bias against science as irrelevant to their lives.

As a technologist growing up in a family of engineers, and one who has taught science to students from second grade through graduate school, I know this from personal experience. All children are naturally inquisitive, but only some are driven to discover scientific facts and to passionately pursue technology as a career.

EARLY CHOICES.

It was fascinating to watch a class of 20 second graders, boys and girls with eyes aglow, constructing batteries from pennies and nickels and salt water. But only a small group stayed after class peppering me with questions.

By fifth grade, the scientists, engineers, poets, basketball players, and beauty queens had all sorted themselves out, some by natural inclination, and some by peer pressure. And it's the same few kids from second grade who stayed after class, that now, as adults, are out in the world building our technology future.

If we recognize that technologists are born and not made, then the solution becomes radically different. We must "hunt and gather" the few natural technologists, rather than try to "sow and reap" a new crop from seed. Such a reorientation in our thinking means a more liberal immigration policy to attract the best and brightest to our shores, and a political and moral environment which embraces, rather than discourages, other cultures and religions.

TURNING THE TABLES.

It also means we have to root out those aspects of poverty and (often unconscious) discrimination that repel naturally inclined minorities and women from staying with science. And we must separate moral and public policy issues from scientific fact. (Nothing is more discouraging to a scientist than spending a career discovering an important truth about nature, only to have a 25-year-old political appointee twist those facts to further a partisan agenda.)

But most important, it means we must fundamentally change the way we teach science.