> Why does chemistry have to be less boring? We are not short on chemists.
Years back, I saw a talk suggesting there was no general shortage of STEM employees in the US, only a need for more programmers, and for science PhD's to more easily shift research focus. Though I've heard it is a bottleneck elsewhere (eg, for Brazil spinning up an indigenous petroleum industry).
But there's also an issue of quality. US chemistry education research describes precollege chemistry education content using adjectives like incoherent, and as leaving both teachers and students steeped in misconceptions. And available STEM competence is a training challenge in many US job areas.
Less boring needn't be less dysfunctional, but less dysfunctional might be less boring.
So when I was working on education content, my line was "it's not clear there's a need, but if it's going to be widely taught anyway, it might as well be taught less wretchedly".
There's also a question, that were science education to transformatively improve, whether a now safety-focused US society would actually want a population with widespread hands-on science skill. But perhaps intensifying surveillance might bridge that gap.
Years back, I saw a talk suggesting there was no general shortage of STEM employees in the US, only a need for more programmers, and for science PhD's to more easily shift research focus. Though I've heard it is a bottleneck elsewhere (eg, for Brazil spinning up an indigenous petroleum industry).
But there's also an issue of quality. US chemistry education research describes precollege chemistry education content using adjectives like incoherent, and as leaving both teachers and students steeped in misconceptions. And available STEM competence is a training challenge in many US job areas.
Less boring needn't be less dysfunctional, but less dysfunctional might be less boring.
So when I was working on education content, my line was "it's not clear there's a need, but if it's going to be widely taught anyway, it might as well be taught less wretchedly".
There's also a question, that were science education to transformatively improve, whether a now safety-focused US society would actually want a population with widespread hands-on science skill. But perhaps intensifying surveillance might bridge that gap.