Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for April 18, 2013

And we’re not falling behind the rest of the world, only the rest of the industrialized nations. We’re still waaaaaaay ahead of Zimbabwe and Bangladesh … for now.

You guys go ahead, we’ll be behind you all the way……

But we’re still #1 in silly cat videos.

Linux0s, and snack food technology…

Using an antiquated system of measurements is not the main problem. The educational approach to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) is the main problem.(Science education is one of my issues; I give free science demonstrations in schools.)

We are number on in teaching condom usage and socialism! USA! USA! USA!

We’re great at producing students who are very talented at filling in circles on standardized tests.

Let’s start by lowering class size, huh?!

Here’s a comment from Europe. From The Netherlands, in fact. That’s the tiny speck of mud around Amsterdam. Our country is so tiny that we have to know what happens in the rest of the world, because if we take one wrong turn on the freeway, we ARE in another country.

EVERY country thinks their educational system is falling behind the rest of the world. Okay, maybe France doesn’t… but France is more ‘megalomaniacally nationalistic’ than ‘developed’. But we think we’re falling behind the USA, England thinks they’re falling behind us,

I think we’re doing pretty much ok. I think the US is doing pretty much ok as well. True talent still comes out on top here, There are many countries where true talent is stifled… and THEN you’re in trouble.

Pompous and circumstantial

I didn’t know this strip was about Oz education.

Our Asian students are smarter than your Asian students.

Oh, plenty of kids graduate, but what do they really learn?

When you can access all the worlds knowledge on your hand held device, why do you need a formal education?

the illusion of educaiton in America, got to love how easily Americans are led. almost makes me proud to be an American, almost. lol

teaching condom use? not in America, the Right wing would flip out if they couldn’t control, deny or perver the sexual behavior of Americans. what country do they even talk about sex as part of human behavior, much less encourage use of condoms. as someone i heard say. Australia got the convicts, America got the perverts/Puritans.

here violence is approved and sex is not. Southern Baptists/aka the South’s religion, would probably approves of burkas. the religious nuts here make the Muslim fundies look like left wing activists. lol

the glorification of sports/celebrities shows how little we value intelligence/education here. the Bread and Circus attitude of keeping the hoi polloi “diverted/busy” automatically leads to and requires a dumbed down populace. and that we have.in spades.sports year round to keep us “focused” so we won’t ask why the country is owned by Inc., Co.

Football, Basketball, Golf ,Baseball, etc.., the list of sports we taxpayers pay for, not the owners. the Team owners, who are subsidized by the taxpayer. very few sports aren’t money making tax payer supported businesses. your local stadium/arena is tax payer paid for, yet the private sectors get the profits.

now don’t we have fun!!! we get what we pay the Owners for, too! Isn’t America great!!

All of the comments here demonstrate that the problem is complex, and everyone is seeing parts of it. The sad problem is, only the educated people who are not influenced by ones with large amounts of money, power, or desires can see the problem and are helpless to actually fix the problem.

The speaker is either a typical stupid politician or the cto of some school publisher cashing in on a lucrative educational system he that he profits from. Promoting irrelevance.

you people are all right! let’s go back to England in charge then we would be under the metric system have a queen an our education system would be better organized.

And these graduates are the ones that were socially promoted. Social promotion, brought to you by those feel good liberals.

No, they are kept stupid by the teacher’s union so they will vote for Democrats.

The necessity of a college degree is pushed primarily by the colleges themselves (and by college loan agencies). Look at unemployment and debt among licensed plumbers and electricians versus Creative Writing graduates.

When political extremists insist on superstition and pseudo-science be taught in schools as REAL science, plus make believing it part of their political purity test the nation has no place to go but down. We’ll lose an entire generation (or more) of children to this nonsense ‘science’. America is GREATLY weakened by this foolishness. It’s an attack on truth

Never lived there.

My daughter graduated 5th in her class of over 500. She also received an International Baccalaureate diploma. She is in the Honor’s program at her University and is getting a Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering and a Bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering.

It takes three things to get an education. The schools and teachers are only one part of it. It also takes the parents and the students doing their part.

A lot of comments for a cartoon that seems completely off base. We have huge numbers of people enrolled in higher education, a large proportion of whom presumably graduate. If we are falling behind it’s not for lack of warm bodies in the seats. Far too many people are taking up space who are not prepared to do the work, or are in trivial programs, or are in programs which have been fluffed up to require four year or even graduate degrees. Social workers and journalists as two of many possible examples for the last. I think the personal pay of teachers in public ed is just fine,and professorial pay is also fine. It’s their working conditions that need looking at. I’m certainly sympathetic to the plights of adjuncts who find themselves given poor pay to deal with the people who shouldn’t even be there. If the government returned to giving loans only to students in programs which were of likely benefit to both student and society, there would be a lot of empty seats but we would all be better off. (Nothing in the world stops you from paying your own way in academic areas that have limited economic utility.)

dennis17 really nailed it on the trivial degrees or fluffed up programs that could be finished in 2 years. A lot of colleges have sold out the students just to make more money. So many people getting degrees that the job market just doesn’t want.

They were the only ones who could AFFORD to go. Lets toss billions at the rest of the world but MOM and DAD you have to go into debt for a thousand years so JUNIOR can go to college. To get a job.Fry cook at McDonalds.Part time.And still pay for his/her medical.Remember all the DOT.COMS companies?Big BADA BOOM. Big BOOM.

World always falling behind itself, kids!

I realise that Wiley had to depict the problem visually, but the issue isn’t so much lack of grads as those grads having received a poor education. There are people with degrees who think the earth is 6,000 years old. Clearly, they were not educated despite having graduated.

Maybe the rest of them couldn’t get off work at McDDDDD’s.

Children think in the present, they have to be taught delayed gratification. If children are not rewarded with something they can relate to, they will not do well in school. The parents have to get involved and also have to be (at least) a rooting section. Parents that show their children that they do not care(even when they do) cause them to just quit.

Not teaching condom usage will assure a new generation of poor children as well as parents who need chemical help. Birth control does not equate with socialism.

20 years ago my brother lived in England. He said you had to have a college degree to work at McDonalds. A McJob is basically responding to flashing lights.

Public Education is a failure.Parents need the freedom to choose the school their child goes to.

The truth is that some things do need improvement (class size, teacher training and especially pay, teaching materials, but bullying is a problem that almost always has roots in the private sector so there’s jack schools can do off grounds) but I can speak from experience that many teachers do their best to help kids. My own practically bent over backwards to help me make up for half a missing English credit that would have prevented me from graduating with my class. Don’t complain when your paycheck has deductions for public education taxes; that’s money going towards the people and institutions who are helping shape our future.

.@DukedougSadly, I have to agree about the quality of graduates. If those are the future, I’m glad my doctors don’t expect me to live past 40. Eight more years and I’m out!

As for why I nearly didn’t graduate, it’s not because I’m dumb. I have Asperger’s, which includes a learning disability and extreme clinical depression, that wasn’t diagnosed in time. I was too busy just trying to make it through the day without knowing what the hell was wrong, and not slitting my wrists, to care about homework.

You’re seriously blaming scientists for the fact that no one has built the fictional John Galt static electricity engine? Is it also the fault of scientists that no one has created a perpetual motion machine, a time machine or a faster-than-light drive? Maybe we should consider the idea that the engine Ayn Rand imagined isn’t practically viable and is possibly even impossible. Rand had to conjure up that imaginary engine in order for her silly book’s heroes to win in the end. It was no different than the heroes of a swords and sorcery book finding the magic orb that gives them a final victory.

People are going to continue to work on wild ideas like the static electricity engine, regardless of what anyone teaches them. Occasionally, someone will make one those things work, but in most cases they’ll fail because what they’re trying to do is as unfeasible as the scientists say they are. There’s a big gap between a defeatist attitude and a practical one.

The idea of using energy to make energy is not outlandish. Look at Formula 1 racing. They use the engine to charge a booster that can give (I think) 100 plus HP when called upon. It only last a few seconds but can really kick up the speed for passing and such. Called ERS. It stores energy to be released by a button on the wheel to boost the HP of the vehicle. There was a 8 wheel electric car built in Asia (I think Japan) that did over 200 mph closed course and used the energy of wheels turning to help keep the batteries up. So it is not far fetched just tremendously expensive at the present.I remember years ago an inventor made a vehicle that used a one cylinder engine to power up a hydraulic pressure system. You would ease the pressure on to operate the gears and such to make the car go. Big Auto and Gas bought up the patent so we would never see it.Trains use the braking effect to make energy to stop the train. No brakes involved on the engine all electric motor only. The more they apply energy to reverse the rotation of the rotor the more energy it puts out to be used. But look at the size of the thing. It is bigger than most cars.But it is the rules that get into effect. The energy in or out NEVER equals the original energy. There is always a loss somewhere as it is changed becoming something different so going back you have to ADD what was lost to begin with. Even Einstein had loss in his Relativity Theory. He dismissed it as an error but in fact there is a loss converting one to the other. Matter to energy and back will always result in some kind of loss. Maybe just molecular but it will occur.

I started college with over a hundred people in my freshman class. 37 of us graduated last year.

Wow. That’s really… amusing. Congratulations. But it might be a bit subtle for most readers..The Galt motor (as far as it was explained) supposedly made use of atmospheric static electricity. And it was in a work of fiction.Thomas Friedman didn’t write anything like what you describe.And thermodynamics is real.

@Michael_wme“You stupid science teachers MUST learn that NOTHING is impossible for American ingenuity”

Thanks, I needed a laugh.So… American ingenuity supercedes reality? That would actually explain a lot.

As a data analyst at a school district, let me tell you what our teachers think is the #1 way to improve education. Vastly reduce regulations. Doing so would eliminate my job and many others at central admin. It would also reduce teacher work time by a substantial amount each day and permit teachers to vary their approach to suit their own teaching style and students. Of course, it would be impossible to accurately identify either teacher or school performance without all the data accumulation. However, it might be worth it.

All math and science in sane public school systems is done using SI (metric) units, though some conversion is taught for those running into old plans or diagrams using English units.

I learned the Metric system in Junior High in the early 1970’s. Heck I think in the metric system as a result of all the engineering classes in College. But I can also think in the standard system and do rough conversions in my head.

We’d do a bit better with out math scores though if we taught dimensional analysis in High School basic science classes. Almost all errors in “memorized” formulas can be eliminating by checking the formula to insure dimensions match those of the expected answer. (e.g. results in feet per seconds squared, acceleration, versus results in feet per second, speed, in an equation).