DV Journal

For an alternative viewpoint, see “Point: Economics Is Destiny”

By nearly all objective measures, the U.S. education system is not fulfilling its primary duty of ensuring that today’s students are prepared to achieve in the world of tomorrow. As we all know, modern society is becoming ever more dependent on technology. Hence, if American students are to compete in the job market of the future, they must be competent in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Unfortunately, as national test scores consistently show, American students are not excelling in science, engineering and mathematics. By contrast, students in nations such as China are making gains in these fields. If America is to remain competitive with China and Russia in the global AI arms race, it is imperative that we emphasize STEM education.

As a former high school social studies teacher, I am well aware that the point of education is not solely to prepare students for the workforce. In truth, the fundamental goal of education is to teach students how to think critically for themselves.

However, far too many of today’s students are failing to even meet the minimum standards when it comes to the hard sciences.

While it is undoubtedly vital for American students to have a thorough understanding of our nation’s history and the ability to understand literature, those skills are becoming less and less relevant in today’s technology-driven society. As such, it makes perfect sense for America’s schools to pivot and prioritize a STEM-focused curriculum.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. education system did a much better job preparing students for success by offering classes specifically designed to aid in the development of skills that could be directly transferred to the workforce. For instance, virtually all high schools offered a “shop class” to students who might pursue a career in one of the many trades. These classes, known as career tech education (CTE), prepared millions of students for in-demand trades such as welding, carpentry, masonry, etc.

Moreover, those students developed a set of real-world skills that they could deploy for the rest of their lives.

In the late 20th century, for various reasons, our education leaders determined that CTE education was no longer necessary and it would be better to focus on soft skills rather than hard skills.

That decades-long experiment has been an utter failure. In fact, America’s education system is now failing on both ends of the spectrum. Not only are the vast majority of today’s students woefully unprepared for a career in coding or any other technology-oriented field because they do not have the requisite mathematics or science background, but they are also falling behind in terms of reading and writing skills.

This begs the question: What are students actually learning? The answer is disturbing: students are learning how to do the bare minimum to get a passing grade.

When I was teaching social studies at an above-average public high school in South Carolina less than a decade ago, I was shocked that nearly all students could not perform basic math, most could not read at grade level, and the majority struggled to write a coherent paragraph.

Tragically, we are now teaching our kids that math is subjective:  1 plus 1 does not necessarily have to equal 2. That may work in a coddled classroom, where the utmost goal is to not hurt a student’s self-esteem, but it will not work in the real world.

Eventually, these students will enter the real world, where they are in for a rude awakening when they realize that objectivity and results, not their feelings, matter most.

The good news is that there still is time to right the ship. By aggressively promoting a STEM-based education, we can ensure that the next generation of American students is primed for success.

The Biden administration’s 11th-hour proposal to force tobacco manufacturers to slash nicotine levels — made just days before President Biden’s exit — was viewed as a political stunt by many public health officials.

Meanwhile, tobacco reduction experts like Jed Rose, the head of the Rose Research Center, say the opportunity for real progress in the fight to get more Americans to stop smoking is on the horizon. More science is needed and more accurate information provided to the public.

It starts with understanding why people smoke.

“Smokers don’t just value the nicotine in their bloodstream,” Rose said, referring to the chemical behind the addiction. “There are sensory cues that become pleasurable to smokers. People who get IV feedings do not feel their hunger satisfied. Likewise, a smoker wants to smoke a cigarette to feel satisfied.”

Rose knows what he’s talking about. More than 40 years ago, he fell into a career working on smoking cessation by accident when he took a temporary job while awaiting a fellowship connected to his doctorate in learning processes underlying anxiety.

In the 1980s, he was named the lead inventor of the nicotine skin patch, along with his physician brother Daniel and the late Murray Jarvik. Rose says he’s studied the most effective strategies for smokers who want to quit.

(Spoiler alert: cold turkey is not one of them, Rose says.)

It turns out, Rose says, the old saw about quitting smoking cigarettes being harder than quitting hard drugs isn’t too far off the mark.

“It’s a really difficult question: Why it’s so much harder to quit smoking,” Rose said. “On a behavioral level, smoking actually helps people to behave more normally. It helps you concentrate better on tasks, helps thinking, reduces anxiety under stress. It enables people to feel they can cope more normally in life. That is harder to give up than ‘feeling high’ such as you get with cocaine.”

Rose was involved in the development of the medicine varenicline, commercially known as  Chantix, which the National Institutes of Health indicates has an effective rate of 40 percent to 60 percent in helping people quit smoking.

Throughout the years, Rose’s research has focused primarily on developing practical tools to help people quit smoking. Giving smokers nicotine replacement methods to wean themselves away from nicotine in cigarettes is only part of the equation. It is essential to replace the sensory and behavioral aspects of smoking with less harmful substitutes.

That’s why it’s so confounding that health regulators keep throwing up roadblocks against electronic delivery devices that research shows improve the likelihood that a person will quit smoking traditional cigarettes.

“It takes more than nicotine to address the addiction,” Rose said. “It’s the feeling of inhaling something. There’s a holistic approach. It’s not just substituting nicotine or another drug but also the behavioral substitution.”

The Food and Drug Administration has approved several pharmaceutical products for nicotine replacement therapy, such as skin patches, chewing gum and lozenges. There are also nicotine sprays and inhalers.

FDA’s population modeling shows that stopping smoking by reducing nicotine in cigarettes is predicated on a 67 percent increase in the use of non-combusted nicotine products as off-ramps from cigarettes.

The day after publishing the cigarette nicotine reduction standard, the FDA authorized 10 flavors of a nicotine pouch product as a less harmful alternative for adults who smoke.

For those looking for a non-drug approach, the FDA has blessed companies to market transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in which a magnetic coil held over one’s head delivers magnetic pulses to the brain. TMS can be used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression and addictions such as smoking.

However, the agency has authorized marketing only for a limited number of heat-not-burn devices or other electronic delivery systems such as e-cigarette cessation — despite evidence from Rose and other researchers showing they can get smokers to quit.

In February 2024, Nancy Rigotti published an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine calling on U.S. public health agencies and the medical community to recognize the value of electronic cigarettes. She based her opinion on comments on research done in Switzerland, which found that study participants who had access to e-cigarettes were more likely to abstain from traditional cigarettes than those who received just smoking-cessation counseling. A recent independent review of the evidence by the Cochrane Library concluded that e-cigarettes were more effective than traditional nicotine replacement methods such as the nicotine patch or gum.

“It is now time for the medical community to acknowledge this progress and add e-cigarettes to the smoking-cessation toolkit,” Rigotti wrote. “U.S. public health agencies and professional medical societies should reconsider their cautious positions on e-cigarettes for smoking cessation. The evidence has brought e-cigarettes to a tipping point. The burden of tobacco-related disease is too big for potential solutions such as e-cigarettes to be ignored.”

However, unintentional and intentional misperceptions about e-cigarettes are rampant, and Rose said the FDA, which regulates such products, is doing little to correct the record. The results are devastating: Surveys show that 80 percent of smokers mistakenly believe that e-cigarettes are just as harmful or even worse than traditional cigarettes.

“Many smokers will not avail themselves of products that can save their lives because nobody is correcting their misperceptions of e-cigarettes,” he said. “It’s costing lives.”

COVID-19 has provided a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience for expertise. The science has been spectacular, but discourse on that science has often been abysmal.

The same-year development, testing, and approval of vaccines was remarkable. The mRNA platform behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could become the Swiss army knife of therapeutics. It’s already being mobilized against cancer and genetic illnesses.

I’m no virologist or geneticist, but experts I respect persuaded me of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. I got jabbed as soon as possible and regret that others chose not to. I wear masks in some situations, and not others. I see people socially but avoid large crowds. I favored lockdowns and school closings in early 2020 but think they lingered too long. My guess is that jurisdictions focused on the most vulnerable populations (elderly, immunocompromised, etc.) will seem wiser in hindsight than those that applied draconian mitigation strategies over their entire populations.

I think I’m right on these things, though I recognize that future evidence might say otherwise. I’m grateful for the scientists who developed the vaccines but strive to maintain an open mind on all scientific matters, along with a sense of humility and a generous spirit toward those who disagree with me. A proper understanding of science demands no less.

The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.

Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I’m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I’ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his tweet from May 5, 2020: “Look at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. … Be smart.”

Here’s why they shouldn’t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But “follow the science” makes no more sense than “follow the chainsaw.” The chainsaw doesn’t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science—let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it—can’t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries.

Science informs individual and collective choices, which depend not only on those scientific findings but also on subjective preferences and one’s degree of confidence in those scientific findings. As for “listen to the experts,” Cuomo wrote the book on COVID expertise, and that book’s fall has been as spectacular as its author’s plummet.

Medical history is littered with experts who were spectacularly wrong. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors employ antiseptic medical procedures (e.g., washing hands in maternity wards), medical experts were offended and conspired to destroy Semmelweis. When Stanley Prusiner suggested that misfolded proteins could cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, he was pilloried as a heretic—a pejorative that didn’t entirely vanish when he received a Nobel Prize for his work. As physicist Max Planck said, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

In October, novelist and essayist Ann Bauer wrote a poignant column, “I Have Been Through This Before,” on her discomfort with the parade of cocksure COVID experts issuing ever-changing diktats and pronouncements. When vaccines didn’t end the pandemic, she wrote, “doctors and officials blamed their audience of 3 billion for the disease. The more the cures failed, the greater the fault of the public.”

The title of her column referred to her personal experience as the mother of an autistic son born in the late 1980s. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had hypothesized that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who failed to show their children sufficient love—a theory we now know to be nonsense. But for a time, Bettelheim’s ideas were gospel-truth, showering mothers of autistic children with guilt and opprobrium. Today, he is regarded as something of a charlatan, but back then, he was a pop icon and celebrity expert on television. One questioned Bettelheim at one’s own peril.

During the pandemic, yard signs have sprouted with the message, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe.” For what it’s worth, chainsaws don’t care what you believe, either.

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