[caption id="attachment_21435" align="aligncenter" width="529" caption="From a report titled 'ASPIRES: Science and career aspirations (age 10-14)' compiled by the ASPIRES Project, London, 2012."]
[/caption]What's keeping away the kids? More specifically, why is there an observable offset of interest from aspiration for children in the age group, as the report claims, 10-14? Here are some snippets from an otherwise incredibly boring report.
Research shows that young people’s aspirations are strongly influenced by their social backgrounds (e.g. by ‘race’/ethnicity, social class and gender) and family contexts where identity and cultural factors play an important role in shaping the perception of science as ‘not for me’.
To this, the report suggests as a solution a broadening of scope in classrooms, to make science a "conceivable career" for students. But that seems to be trivializing the problem, which I think won't get sorted until classrooms are targeted individually. The problems of race and social class (or of caste and poverty in India) cannot be generalized impact-wise in any sense.
... countries with high attainment and participation rates in mathematics (such as Japan) also record amongst the lowest levels of student liking for the subject.
In India, in 1966, the Kothari Commission Report was submitted by Dr. D. S. Kothari to the Prime Minister. The report recommended that the government had to focus on a carefully chosen set of subjects in order to bolster its economy to meet certain important targets in the engineering sector.
Unfortunately, the curriculum that was created those five decades ago spurred a surplus of science and engineering graduates as well as colleges and institutions, conceiving a fixation that these and related courses translated to job security. Even though the situation may seem to be different today, a close examination will reveal that any Indian family is half-composed of engineers and management graduates.
My point is that participation rates - which could be purely because parents insist that their children study this or that and nothing else - don't necessarily translate into liking for the subjects. And when participation rates in schools are used by committees and organizations to predict what the future composition of graduates will be, their reports are likely to discourage further action in the sector.
The next point I strongly agree with, in both global and Indian contexts.
Science education policy has been strongly criticised for assuming that its primary importance is to prepare the next generation of the nation’s professional scientists (the ‘science pipeline’ model).
The 'science pipeline' model also goes on to create a certain profile of the larger science population (such as the image of a geek), to which certain minority groups may not be able to relate. That leads to discouragement and a closeting of aspirations.
The solution? I don't know. Maybe awareness? I'm skeptical.
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