Opinion: How NASA can help educate our kids

Education is one of the most important topics to Americans. As a nation we devote huge resources to educating our children, local school boards and state government last year spent over $800 billion on education. At the federal level, the Department of Education’s budget last year was just over $57 billion. This represents substantially more money than the nation spent on national defense in all its aspects including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, national intelligence, and the department of homeland security.

In fact, the national average secondary schooling expenditure per child in the United States is third in the world, behind only Switzerland and Finland and well ahead of Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China.

Yet, by all objective measures, American students are significantly lagging in almost every area to their foreign counterparts. Math, Science, even language testing scores lag significantly behind other modern industrialized nations.

Equally troubling is the decline in college graduates in engineering, mathematics, and science.

During the 20th century, there were two significant periods of growth in the training of American engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. The first was World War II and its immediate aftermath. Certainly we would rather not expand our capability based on a war, and the circumstances of the GI bill may not be applicable. The other period of expansion was shortly after Sputnik and the decline started with the end of Apollo. Is there a lesson here?

If you really want students to learn, they must be interested; more than that students must be excited, they must be inspired.

We need inspiration, [and] what NASA has provided in the past, NASA can provide again: inspiration.