Eight Out Of China’s Top Nine Government Officials Are Scientists

[n2doc]

by Peter Murray May 17th, 2011

Did you know that the president of China is a scientist? President Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer. Likewise his Premier, Wen Jiabao, is a geomechanical engineer. In fact, 8 out of China’s top 9 government officials are scientists. What does the scientific prominence atop China’s ruling body say, if anything, about the role of science and technology in China’s ability to compete against the U.S. and the world in terms of innovation and economic might?

Quick, name a scientist member of your government’s top offices.

That’s a tough one if you’re an American, as out of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, only 22 have science or engineering backgrounds, and of these only two might be considered experienced scientists or engineers. As an American myself, I guess that would explain why I tend to assume all politicians were lawyers in their previous lives.

You have to be pretty popular to get elected, so should we conclude that Chinese people in general look up to and admire their scientists? Former CEO of Lockheed Martin, Norm Augustine, writes in Forbes that that’s exactly the case–and not only in China: “…scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries. They’re not seen as geeks or misfits, as they too often are in the U.S.”

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http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-top-nine-government-officials-are-scientists/

[RKP5637]

1. I have a feeling that a few of our 535 members of the U.S. Congress could not

even spell scientist.

[n2doc]

2. And what's worse, they are proud of the fact! n/t

[woo me with science]

3. I would love to see this in GD. nt

[ZombieHorde]

4. America is one of the dumbest countries in the world. nt

[Gregorian]

5. Haha.

We're so fucking history.

[Jim__]

6. How many of China’s top nine government officials were scientists in 1989?

You remember - Tiananmen Square?

I have lots of problems with our government; but I still prefer it to anything resembling the government of China.

[sudopod]

7. It's not a question of desireability, but of long-term stability.

Which system has more survivability in the long term, the one that puts people who don't believe in evolution in charge of science education, or the one run by mechanical engineers?

Mind you, our problems aren't built into our system like those of the Chinese, but we'll have to get a whole lot less dumb as a whole to fix them.

[Jim__]

8. "A scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates citizens: ..."

This is a long article in The Nation by William Deresiewicz on the state of higher education in the US. This excerpt appears toward the end of the article; it seems pertinent to this thread as it talks a little bit about higher education in China:

Yet the liberal arts, as we know, are dying. All the political and parental pressure is pushing in the other direction, toward the “practical,” narrowly conceived: the instrumental, the utilitarian, the immediately negotiable. Colleges and universities are moving away from the liberal arts toward professional, technical and vocational training. Last year, the State University of New York at Albany announced plans to close its departments of French, Italian, Russian, classics and theater—a wholesale slaughter of the humanities. When Garland enumerates the fields a state legislature might want to encourage its young people to enter, he lists “engineering, agriculture, nursing, math and science education, or any other area of state importance.” Apparently political science, philosophy, history and anthropology, among others, are not areas of state importance. Zemsky wants to consider reducing college to three years—meaning less time for young people to figure out what to study, to take courses in a wide range of disciplines, to explore, to mature, to think.

When politicians, from Barack Obama all the way down, talk about higher education, they talk almost exclusively about math and science. Indeed, technology creates the future. But it is not enough to create the future. We also need to organize it, as the social sciences enable us to do. We need to make sense of it, as the humanities enable us to do. A system of higher education that ignores the liberal arts, as Jonathan Cole points out in The Great American University (2009), is what they have in China, where they don’t want people to think about other ways to arrange society or other meanings than the authorized ones. A scientific education creates technologists. A liberal arts education creates citizens: people who can think broadly and critically about themselves and the world.

Yet of course it is precisely China—and Singapore, another great democracy—that the Obama administration holds up as the model to emulate in our new Sputnik moment. It’s funny; after the original Sputnik, we didn’t decide to become more like the Soviet Union. But we don’t possess that kind of confidence anymore.

There is a large, public debate right now about primary and secondary education. There is a smaller, less public debate about higher education. What I fail to understand is why they aren’t the same debate. We all know that students in elementary and high school learn best in small classrooms with the individualized attention of motivated teachers. It is the same in college. Education, it is said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket. The word comes from the Latin for “educe,” lead forth. Learning isn’t about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think. It is about the kind of interchange and incitement—the leading forth of new ideas and powers—that can happen only in a seminar. (“Seminar” being a fancy name for what every class already is from K–12.) It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time.

much more ...

[n2doc]

9. And a business/Law education creates what?

Thieves? Assholes? or....

Because that's what we seem to be striving for in this country.