[There are typos in the essay I’m responding to. I think they are probably due to the site’s archiving since the Scientific American website is generally well-edited. I’ve kept the typos and avoided using the “(sic)” notation—the reader can make the corrections in his or her head.]
In this essay posted several years back, Look East, Young Man, Tony Rothman of the Princeton physics faculty tells us that even supposedly elite American students can’t compete against Asians or Eastern Europeans or first generation Asian-Americans in the hard field of physics. Near the end, Rothman writes:
People often ask me, Can this really be happening at Princeton? Arent your students the best of the best? Im telling you it can happen at Princeton and is. My chief worry about the [“super-deluxe track” of freshman physics] minoritywho take physics out of genuine interest and who, despite the fact that we regularly pulverize them with our exams, generously reconstitute themselves is that we are needlessly discouraging potentially excellent physicists. (Some of the…dropouts, Im told, remain bitter for life.)
I’ll leave it to the reader to contemplate Rothman’s qualification that it’s “first generation Asian-Americans” who can compete with the students from Asia and from eastern Europe. As a freshman physics major in 1973, I was struck by the fact that the Ashkenazi Jewish students (mostly from New York City) had covered much of the material in their high school years that was new to me as a college freshman, but most were little different from other Americans in work and socializing habits. The physics stars in my class, at least in the freshman year, were a group of a dozen or so ethnic Chinese from Malaysia. At the same time, I knew of a couple of Ashkenazi Jewish students who’d attended NYC’s magnet schools and maybe had taken courses at Columbia or CCNY; those few students were taking mostly graduate school courses in math and chemistry from their freshmen years. What remains strongest in my memories is walking through science and engineering buildings and seeing a very high percentage of Asian graduate students and post-docs. American taxpayers were putting up good money to provide weak science and math educations in high school to their students talented in those areas and good money to brutalize those students in college as they watched foreign students and first-generation immigrant students perform well. In addition, lots of money was being spent to provide excellent graduate school educations to some substantial body of foreign and immigrant students. (I don’t begrudge a good education to those students but I do begrudge the failure of the American educational system to prepare talented young Americans.)
A math professor told me something similar to one of Rothman’s observations: I had bad writing skills, little ability to write coherent sentences to a firm purpose. Even my reading skills, once very advanced by age-group standards, had decayed over four years of watching TV, listening to many hours of pop-music, and reading sci-fi. To be sure, I was fighting boredom by heavy use of the town library which was almost across the street from my family’s house, but I had little guidance and my reading tastes decayed, followed by my reading skills. And the peer-pressure was intense for one who had no reason to believe his interest in history and science was anything but weird. In American schools, at least in a blue-collar town in the Connecticut River Valley, you had to watch The Monkees and Laugh-in and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and—of course—some Red Sox and Bruins games to be able to join the conversations at recess and lunchtime. This was crappy stuff even by the standards of mind-candy—a certain amount of which is necessary for the mental and emotional health of even the most serious of thinkers. Even in spectator sports, everyone, and all our local communities, would have been better off if we had followed local teams, little league or semi-pro. Yes, all of this stuff, high and low culture and much else, is important in the formation of moral character and all that is made possible by good moral character. Even low culture shouldn’t be stuff that leads to weakening of that moral character, to a decay in work-habits and the ability to concentrate.
Rothman wrote in the quote above: “(Some of the…dropouts, Im told, remain bitter for life.)”
I didn’t go to Princeton but I’m one with those bitter dropouts from physics. I admit I perhaps had less excuse than the students Rothman refers to as I was a special scholarship student with an assigned mentor and was encouraged to believe that many American physics students went through a troubled undergraduate career and went on to success in the field. Help was even available from the physics department but I adopted a fatalistic attitude and dropped down to a relatively weak mathematics major. I was raised to be morally soft and was educated in the public schools of my town to be numbed down if not quite dumbed down, that is, I performed very well on IQ tests and standardized academic tests but had lost my once good attention span during my high school years and couldn’t perform well in academic work of a more demanding sort. I was actually recovering and did fairly well in my latter years as an undergraduate as a math major but was thoroughly demoralized and went on to become an underachieving actuary—labeled as such by a manager at Fireman’s Fund, a future CEO of three major companies. If not for the emotional damage, I would have been far better off in graduate school studying physics or math or engineering.
I have to admit that one of my high school math teachers warned me that he had watched me decay from an enthusiastic, hardworking student over my high school years—I should have had, and many talented students should have, enriched education, including supervision of developing work-habits, right from elementary school years; much of what was missing was actually the responsibility of my parents and of other adults, not just the teachers and administrators in the school system.
And so, I went to college with behaviors and attitudes corresponding to some belief I would magically do well in the same way I did in high school—in Euclidean Geometry (tenth grade), I had gotten perfect scores on the tests and quizzes up to Christmas vacation without doing a single homework assignment; I was threatened with an `F’ if I didn’t make up all those assignments over that vacation. Something was seriously wrong and I have some reason to believe that there were discussions about the situation held behind my back, but nothing was said to me, no guidance was given to me, no offer of enriched education was made until a ridiculous and useless effort to put me in contact with a local physics professor in the latter part of my senior year of high school.
I know my mother was afraid of disrupting my social development if my academic development was accelerated. but my most enjoyable and healthiest socializing came in my neighborhood, in pickup games and in card games and even tree-climbing; I could have enjoyed that healthier activity while going on to advanced courses in nearby colleges.
I, who grew up in a town of gentle and morally irresponsible citizens, the town itself embedded in a morally degenerate country, fit in with the students described by Rothman:
In [the freshman physics course for engineering majors and most science majors], the difference between the Asian students and the American students is so marked that they might well constitute distinct populations, and the reason can only be rooted in cultural attitudes: an American student may be failing the course and still think he is getting an A, while an Asian student may be getting an A+ and think she is failing the course. Asians are here to work; Americans are here to ensure that Princeton remains a Division 1 athletic powerhouse. The results are naturally evident, not only on test scores, but in work habits. Asian students exams, correct answers or not, tend to be models of clarity, each step written out clearly below the previous. Exams from Americans often more closely resemble Rorschach tests, ink blots left as exercises for interpretation.
Yes, I wrote out many a Rorschach test for the professors, though something came through to impress some of those professors who may or may not have known I was there under a special scholarship program named after, and perhaps funded by, Joseph Wilson who had retired from Xerox, a company he had co-founded and had set out to help further build up the University of Rochester—he died months before my freshman year began. On the whole, I fit in with those Rorschach students but I was supposed to be on a deluxe, not super-deluxe, track for talented physics and mathematics majors. I couldn’t do the work and needed to be put in a two-year program in which I would be doing college-level work under closer supervision. Doesn’t happen in this country though the mathematician Raymond Wilder was writing about this problem in the 1950s and claiming many talented American students could be rescued by the proper program and the right teachers. As it is, the bureaucrats set schedules for everyone and many Americans, including my mother and my younger self—with much reluctance—followed those schedules with a fatalistic attitude. Perhaps physics professors, if they still have the power they had in the days when the Pentagon needed their work, could start a remedial, habit-formation program and require all American physics majors to enter it if they don’t demonstrate the competence and mature attitude of those Asian students? Even an effort to start such a program would provide some needed embarrassment for the American educational system and for American culture in general.
I’ll diverge somewhat to point out that, circa 1973 when I was entering college, Hannah Arendt‘s last work, The Life of the Mind, was published posthumously. In that book, she followed up on earlier works where she took the measure of American moral character and found it wanting—famously, she claimed that Americans were much like Adolf Eichmann, the logistical genius behind the Holocaust, who was nice but had no real moral character at all. Eichmann did his job, did what he was expected to do, though not a believing Nazi. In that last work, Professor Arendt claimed that Americans had set the United States on such a path that within a generation or so, we would be facing a difficult situation which would leave but two options Americans could fall back into a relative state of poverty and powerlessness or could become an outright empire and steal what the United States could no longer make. In a sense, we can’t make good science in the truly difficult fields and need to `steal’ brains from other countries, more or less as Rothman points out in his essay. One problem, even from the political and bureaucratic viewpoint, is that this isn’t a matter under the control of the American power elite as is the decision to invade and destroy other countries or to use much of our wealth to produce high-tech weaponry. There aren’t enough good-quality American scientists and engineers, and may soon not be enough foreign scientists and engineers, to keep up our infrastructure, to develop new energy technologies, to modernize our infrastructure, and so on.
The cultural and spiritual problems are even more fundamental than the political and economic problems. We have turned ourselves into creatures who can’t entertain or educate ourselves nor can we even guide ourselves or our children in proper use of public or private resources, such as libraries. The two, entertainment and education, are greatly overlapping activities in a true civilization. We have built an education system which teaches some rudimentary skills in literacy and then teaches the students to consider the novels of Charles Dickens as objects of an unpleasant activity called “studying”. This is a negative accomplishment of monumental proportion: we teach our students to hate reading even the greatly popular literary works of past but recent generations. And so it is that many of them who are inclined to literacy in some strong sense will `study’ Charles Dickens novels and then read Stephan King novels for pleasure.
Almost all modern human beings are capable of concrete thought of at least some minimal competence though there are some who seem socially competent yet can’t be trusted to take care of their morning toiletries. Many human beings are capable of high levels of concrete thought and I’ve known some who were at best marginal students in formal classroom settings but have acquired some serious levels of abstract thinking skills after years of difficult machining tasks or the like. Some conquered trigonometry in the machine-shop thought they would have likely failed in that subject in a classroom.
This is getting both long and depressing. Let me close with another quote from Rothman’s essay, Look East, Young Man:
If the Asians are the most industrious, the best prepared are the Eastern-Europeans, who come equipped with the vestiges of old Soviet-style education. Those students, passing through a system largely influenced by the mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov, have often attended special math-science schools and have been fire-tested through Olympiads. Few Russian undergraduates are visible in Princeton physics, but our Bulgarians , Romanians and Serbs tend to be so well trained that not long ago I was forced to quip to a colleague, Anyone whose last name ends in ovich, adzich, or escu should be put in the honors course without discussion. No exaggeration. Each year a tiny handful of studentsfour or fiveplaces out of freshman physics altogether via an in-house exam. Last year none of these were American.
The standard retort to such observations is that foreign education rewards discipline, while American education rewards creativity. Believe me, Id settle for some Yankee discipline, and Ive seen no lack of creativity on the part of the foreign students. Never forget that the Manhattan Project and the postwar science boom was largely the work of immigrants. The fact that American students have all taken AP physics is virtually irrelevant; they have clearly been taught to pass a standardized test and their knowledge of actual physics generally suffices for three weeks.