One of the Silicon Valley’s most respected figures and well-known VCs, Floyd Kvamme provided the opening keynote for today’s event. It was a great overview of the opportunities for innovation and economic growth if the United States takes a leading role in revolutionizing the energy sector. It was a persuasive argument that heavily referenced Kvamme’s work on the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, which recently released a paper called: The Energy Imperative: Technology and the Role of Emerging Companies .
However, the post powerful part of the keynote for me was his discussion of the state of science and technology education in the United States. To illustrate his point, he borrowed something he heard from the late A. Richard Newton, the former dean of the University of California, Berkeley Collegeof Engineering.To illustrate just how bad the current situation is, Mr. Newton told Mr. Kvamme something along the lines of:
We’ve all heard friends and acquaintances tell us, "I’m no good at math. I can’t even balance my checkbook." It’s usually meant to be funny and we all tend to laugh. But, what if they said, "I’m no good at reading. I can’t even read the newspaper." Would that be funny? Of course not,
I thought it was a tremendously instructive about the nature of the problem. It is not simply that our schools don’t teach math and science effectively, it’s that American society does not VALUE science and technology education enough. It reminds us that any effort to improve the performance of American students in science and technology needs to include an effort to address the broader societal belief that, "It’s OK to be Math-challenged. Lots of people are… isn’t it funny?"