Speaker Gingrich On Math and Science Education

Aside: In case you’re interested, a friend has some musings about Putin and the Left. The shock for me is that anyone could side with Putin. Also, see my blog for some thoughts about what “The Daily Show” represents.

Newt Gingrich has a really interesting line of thought, which I disagree with somewhat, on math and science and our schools. What I love about his thought can be summed up in his statement here:

Scientific research spending must be considered part of the national security budget.

Gingrich’s words there aren’t a simple assertion about a budget. When taken together with his other statements, it looks like he’s giving science and technology a role: such things must help us defend our nation, otherwise our values and virtues could count for nothing. Liberals and libertarians assume, of course, that this will magically happen, but the truth is that where we invest is dependent on what we think is most important. Right now, we think erectile dysfunction medication is critical. Technology is not oriented towards keeping us safe unless something bad happens.

The area of disagreement I have with him is that while he’s conscious of a problem – i.e. that since science oriented towards our security, just like when it is oriented towards our creature comforts, is the attempt to exercise pure power, and therefore must be a technological edge against other nations in order to have that power, otherwise all previous scientific efforts are a waste – he’s not seeing that we probably spend too much on math and science education as is. Our heritage is going to pieces, and we’re not able to articulate why this nation is good. At best, we can only articulate why other nations are bad.

The thing about an education is that except for math and science, it cannot be subject to popular decision-making. If this nation could throw out Shakespeare in order to get another shiny new type of cell phone, it would – every one of us, including myself, does so every day: every time I’m playing video games and not reading Plato, I’m saying that something is more important than trying to understand the past and trying to see where mankind has come. Our attitude is “make money and live comfortably,” and that’s not the attitude one can approach education policy with: one doesn’t need to know anything, strictly speaking, to do either. It does help that math and science add to mastery of the physical world, but the ancient and medieval worlds, for religious and philosophical reasons, wouldn’t consider what we do in those areas knowledge, as we make grand claims through them without any awareness of how empty and stupid we will sound later.

So my criticism of Speaker Gingrich is that in saying “more math and science,” he’s opening the way for populism to wreck our schools even more, by setting a very practical standard for where we need to go. The question of education is whether we want to survive as a people appreciative of our heritage and as many heritages as possible, or whether we want to survive simply, through common defense. It’s a tough call, and I respectfully disagree with the Speaker, because we have been surviving simply far too long, and now cannot even say “terrorism is bad” or “families are worth having.”