From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.

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monkeyelite 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

For this theory to hold up you would need to explain what changed as high schools in the US have loved sports since at least the 40s

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deepsun 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Changed was the reduction of brain-drain from Germany/Hungary and later USSR to the US.

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eli_gottlieb 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I doubt much changed. American STEM education has always been pretty mediocre. I've been hearing about my whole life.

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nradov 5 days ago | parent [-]

Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.

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bell-cot 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately, those metrics are very focused on the 0.1%, if not the 0.01%.

Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.

	▲	monkeyelite 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		? That’s a common use case for sorting though.

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aprilthird2021 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc.

I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.

	▲	RoyalSloth 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If someone is curious about this data, I made a little analysis a while ago - Nobel Prize in numbers: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/nobel-prize-in-numbers/#sec...
	▲	monkeyelite 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, they are getting visas via academia employment.

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cyberax 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

About a half of Nobel Prizes in the US were awarded to immigrants or children of immigrants.

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Aurornis 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Something that isn’t obvious to non-Americans or non-parents is just how diverse the US education system is. Even within a medium size city you’ll find multiple schools that might have completely different cultures.

Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.

I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.

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Fade_Dance 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is true (and they do take a large amount of things like money and resources), but these cultural influences are also very loud. You will find that the majority of the kids in the cafeteria really don't give a crap about any of that, and that goes for the parents as well.

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apical_dendrite 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It really depends on the town, the school, and the social circle of the parents. If you live in a wealthy Boston suburb, academics are emphasized much more than sports, and expectations for students are very high. If you live in rural Appalachia, then football is king.