<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 10:05 AM, George Siemens <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gsiemens@gmail.com">gsiemens@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div>Question: How do those of you who are calling for large scale educational reform (I'm one, btw), but don't earn your living in the "practical sciences" like engineering, math, etc., envision the future of your discipline if the traditional system implodes? Who will pay the people whose research and ideas influence decades in the future, rather than in the next quarterly corporate report?</div>
</blockquote><div><br>George, <br><br>Are you saying that STEM ideas always have immediate
practical benefit? I am most familiar with mathematics, and this is
definitely not true for the majority of math research. But every subject
area has its basic or theoretical parts that may directly influence the
economy decades or sometimes centuries into the future, or not at all.
"A mathematician's lament" - influential in math ed circles - is about
this theme. <a href="http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html" target="_blank">http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html</a><br>
<br>To answer your question...<br><br>I think parents would pay - they care what happens decades in the future.<br><br>Long-term scholarly and R&D communities may want to pay for ideas relevant to their members.<br>
<br>People who like futurism of all sorts may pay for it, too.<br><br>Cheers,<br>
Maria Droujkova<br>
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