Academic Olympics
I have been watching the 2012 London Olympics these past two weeks and I have been immensely impressed especially since I have been able to watch more than usual. I have also gotten to see some of the more unique events like synchronized swimming in which I would probably drown if I tried it.
It is awesome that we are leading the medal count but today I wondered what would happen/how we would feel if the US got very few or no medals since we normally do very well. I assume we would be very embarrassed and dump a lot of money into our training programs. I heard during this Olympics that either China or Russia did something similar when they lost an event in the Beijing Olympics.
This thought lead to the thought that it is too bad we don’t have an academic Olympics (grades ~3 through senior in college) so we would put a lot of money into our country’s education programs so we wouldn’t lose since we were ranked average in reading and science and below average in math by PISA in 2009 (we should want to be first). I then realized that there are some problems with this plan. First, it would take some work to make the academic Olympics as interesting to watch as the summer or winter Olympics and including enough events to make it last long enough to be a big thing. Second, the US would probably do well since we would be sending our best students so we probably wouldn’t feel compelled to dump more money into our education.
One benefit of the academic Olympics might be that we would have more academic stars. Currently, it seems that in the US most of our stars and people that we want to emulate are athletes, musicians, and actors/actresses (Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the few academic celebrities). I want to see the same fandom for engineers, scientists, mathematics, and other academics that other celebrities get.
I agree that not enough emphasis or support is placed on academics.