Let’s track the results this year.
Several years ago I noticed that the annual announcements of Nobel Prize winners demonstrated a remarkable trend: A majority of the winners in one year were products of one educational institution, the public schools of the United States.
Elementary and secondary education is not always indicated in the prize announcements, so it often takes a bit more digging. Nobel Prize announcements come out this week. Yesterday the prizes for Medicine or Physiology went to two Americans, both under 50. Today the prizes in Physics went to two more Americans.
If you see a note talking about the elementary and secondary schooling of these people, would you send it along? These prizes may indicate the health of the schools 20 or 30 years ago — but that would put it at the same time we were talking about “a rising tide of mediocrity.” It’s a long-after-the-fact measure, but an interesting one (to me, anyway).
Year in and year out, public school alumni win most of the Nobel Prizes awarded since World War II. How long can such a trend of success continue?
(I’m keeping quiet about the other trend. The iRNA research is steeped in evolution theory; the COBE work for which the physics prize was awarded confirms the Big Bang. Young Earth creationists especially must be hoping for other news to hide this research from general public understanding.)
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 