Silicon Valley breeding nationwide schools-for-profit scheme

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4. So why do we suck at math?

Why do we have all these STEM initiatives if we're not sorely lacking in those skills? Why do we have a glut of English lit majors and not a majority of engineers or programmers?

It just seems that there are more maths people from the East (regardless of there being more people, period) than we have here. I read some article in, I believe, The Week that said the Eastern written languages were almost mathematical in and of themselves (the Romans, after all, used letters for their numbers) and that it really is a matter of the West does better with classical Greco-Roman liberal arts stuff while the East is better known for the maths and sciences. Some programmer (from India, natch) wrote a book and the magazine was reviewing it. It doesn't explain how some of us Westerners are able to learn the language of coding and maths, like Gates or Einstein. Because far as I know, Bill Gates doesn't speak Chinese, and Albert Einstein was dyslexic.

I don't know if any of this is true or not, or what, if anything, we can do to correct the problem so that we don't keep sucking at math and the next generation of Americans ends up a bunch of permanently indebted janitors with useless master's degrees in gender studies and criminal justice. Making college free doesn't solve the problem of why we suck at math. It just means that an English lit degree would be valued at a price of what it's basically worth. Zero -- another thing the maths folks discovered over in India while we Westerners were going gaga over Plato.