Just about every speech you hear about our nation’s educational shortcomings puts math and science at the forefront, and last night’s State of the Union address was no exception. President Obama tapped into our competitive anxieties—maybe even our latent Tiger Motherism—when he invoked China and India, countries that were “educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science.” It is U.S. “math and science education,” the President said, that “lags behind many other nations.”
Now, I know, of course, how important math and science are. And, in fact, I’d like to have seen the President tie the need to study them in school more explicitly and inspiringly to challenges that need solving: global warming, cures for disease. But (and I swear it’s not only because I’m a writer) every once in a while I’d like to hear a speech like this invoke reading, writing, and, heck, maybe the study of other languages, too.
Because, frankly, if we’re lagging behind in math and science, we’re not doing all that much better in reading and writing. Twenty-six per cent of twelfth graders performed at or above the “proficient” level in math according to the latest Nation’s Report Card, a periodic assessment conducted for the U.S. Department of Education, and just twenty-one per cent did so in science. But only twenty-four per cent were proficient in writing—marginally fewer than in math—and thirty-eight per cent in reading. Our best public-school systems often provide more differentiated instruction in math—allowing talented math students to work at higher levels—than they do in the humanities. And the worst public-school systems teach both just as badly.
Maybe we’ll all be communicating in emoticons and text abbreviations eventually, but for now we still need to know how to write and read a little more eloquently than that. If nothing else, we need people to write the speeches about how important math and science are.