="David Makin" <makinmagic@tiscali.co.uk> When a government spends around 8* more on "defence" than education is it any wonder
Right, that's why, for example, Lesotho, which apparently spends 3rd highest per pupil in % of GDP on education (10.4%) but ranks only 138th in per capita military expenditures (2.8%)--a factor of about 3.7 in the other direction--leads the world in mathematical contributions.
these should be gradually phased out along with any educational institutions having religious bias of any variety
Right, that's why, for example, Utah (presumably more religious) apparently gets .21 SAT points for every dollar they spend, while Washington DC (presumably more secular) apparently only gets .07 SAT points per dollar. Along similar lines, I recall an article in the AMS Notices a few years back indicating that Chinese teacher performance was many times that of American, despite carrying roughly twice as dense class sizes. Personally, I'm not able to discern any positive correlation between throwing resources at this and achieving better results. It appears something else appears to be a more dominant influence. And finally there's Garfunkel and Mumford's position "All this worry, however, is based on the assumption that there is a single established body of mathematical skills that everyone needs to know[...]. This assumption is wrong." Surely then, spending more on something that's not broken won't fix anything, right? I do agree we're drifting further afield from any fun factor in this thread, so I'll shut up now.