American students avoid science and math because of ... postmodernism?

When I was a kid, adults encouraged us kids to eat vegetables that might not typically appeal to us by saying things like, "eat this so that you will do better in science."  Or sometimes, it was "eat this so that you will get better at maths."  I am sure quite a few kids held their noses and gobbled up vegetables they hated only to make sure that they did better in science and math.  (Not me: I loved them all--vegetables and science and math!)

I wonder if parents and grandmas say that anymore to India's children.  Perhaps not.  If so, that will be awful, because the kids don't know what they are missing--vegetables and education!

Here in the US, the veggie food route to science and math will never work, given the typical aversion that most children have for vegetables, science, math.  Well, I take it back; it appears that the young might even hold their noses and swallow the veggies if they can entirely avoid science and math.  Again, they don't know what they are missing--vegetables and education! (Except this veggie, of course!)

My initial experiences of Americana were as a graduate student.  Walking or biking across campus from the social sciences area towards math, science, and engineering, well, was often punctuated by an observation about the rapidly decreasing female population.  The few female students in those areas were almost always graduate students from India or China or Europe.  American-born undergraduate science or math majors, male or female, were a minority on campus. 

American students avoiding math and science seems to have only gotten worse.  American-born science and math students are practically an endangered species in higher education. And that is terribly unfortunate.

The higher education system, meanwhile, makes it all the more attractive for students to almost bypass science and math.  While by now I ought to be used to this, I continue to be shocked every single time when I realize how easy it is for students to complete "higher education" and even graduate with a perfect 4.0 GPA, but with barely a couple of classes in science.  And even those science classes tend to be "Mickey Mouse" classes, as one student put it.

The hyper-inflated sense of self that students gain throughout their K-12 system does not help either.  The school system appears to be hell-bent on telling students how special they all are, and that they can do anything they wanted to do in life. Of course, we need to convey the idea that the world is their oyster, but shouldn't we also make sure they understand that hard work is a prime ingredient in a successful formula?  But, it seems that educators systematically dismiss that often one needs to go after difficult tasks, and that life is not simply about plucking those non-existent metaphorical low hanging fruits.

Science and math are by no means any low hanging fruit.  Well, accomplishment in anything, in the arts or languages or whatever, is not as easy to pluck those fruits.

I am convinced that this awful state of education is a result of the postmodernist conditions in education--though I love the postmodernist environment within which I operate.  Modernism and reason have been replaced with arguments of multiple truths.  While philosophically I have no problems with this, and have come to enjoy it over the years, the translation of these ideas into how we educate students means that we are in the mess that we are in now.

The multiplicity of truths, as opposed to the truth, has led us to legitimize any crazy approach to education as equally valid.  Along the way, we have even empowered students to stand up and loudly proclaim their aversions towards science and math.  We have then provided plenty of routes for them to "succeed" without ever having to deal with science and math.  (They do geography, for instance!)

Students educated in this manner in colleges and universities across these United States then go on to become teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools, where they amplify the message that children can do whatever they want to do without ever paying homage to science and math.  Science and math be damned, eh!

I still shudder recalling how an English professor told the freshman Honors students, in a course that I had put together, that it was completely ok if they were not good in science and math.  Because, she was like that and she made it as an English professor.  What a message to give impressionable college freshman, right?

Thus, even a small university like mine has quite an extraordinary amount of fluffy courses (like geography?) where students can excel.  The number of students graduating with the various levels of "laude" honors seems to increase year after year.  A casual scan of the list here indicates the highly skewed ratio of non-science to science majors when it comes to summa and magna cum laude.  Seriously, how many of us will openly admit that for a typical student, earning a B in organic chemistry is way more difficult than earning an A in economic geography?  I will.

What have we gained then as a society after thousands of students thus graduate magna cum laude?