The following essay is a personal reflection on progress in STEM education and society.

December 20, 2017 –

Almost no one knew Big Jo by her given name, Willie Dean Ferguson. Everyone knew her by her nickname, ‘Big Jo.’ In 1962 she was about 100 years old. She was an African-American woman, born during the Civil War, descended from slaves, and lived from the war, through Reconstruction and Jim Crowe, to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. She ate graham crackers softened by dipping into a glass of milk, necessitated by a lifetime of dental wear. Escaping the summer heat, she sat on her porch, dipping snuff tobacco and chewing tobacco.  She earned her living as a labor broker, arranging employment for workers on local tobacco farms. Horry (pronounced O’ree) County was the most abundant tobacco-producing county in South Carolina. The only other work available to many African-Americans was day and household labor, the timber industry, and seasonal summer work at what was then a small resort town called Myrtle Beach. The internet had not yet been invented. She had a primitive form of text messaging, runners going up and down the street, and throughout her neighborhood, carrying messages and working out arrangements, brokering employment arrangements between farmers and the members of the African American community.

In February 1962, my father bought what is now our family farm. It is through our visits to Big Jo that I got to know for a just a little bit, about her, and her connection to our farm. She was employed by my father to help staff the farm with seasonal labor.

That same year, on February 20, 1962, Colonel John H. Glenn, was the United States third astronaut in space, the first American to circumnavigate the earth in a spacecraft.

In 1963 I entered the 1st grade. I was eager to learn, all day, every day. I was never keen on subjects in school that didn’t interest me, but I was intensely interested in NASA’s space program, history, and the world around me. I have vague but distinct memories of the attempted rocket launches blowing up with regularity, and eventually improving, succeeding such that the Mercury Seven astronauts went to space without loss of life.

Author Tom Wolfe described the original group of American astronauts, the Mercury Seven, as men that had ‘The Right Stuff.’ Indeed, they did have the right stuff, but there were many more, anonymous people, that had the right stuff also. They had what some call ‘grit.’ The generations before mine had endured hardships unknown to many today.  World War 2, preceded by the Great Depression, and The Great War (WWI). They knew what facing hard work, and significant risk was. They knew what life was like without social support networks and safety nets against extreme poverty. They experienced inadequate education, healthcare, and housing. In 1950, the educational level of the average American was only the 8th grade. At the end of World War 2, many states had not even implemented 12-grade public education.

The “Greatest Generation,” born from 1901 to 1924, is the generation that provided B-17, and B-24 pilots and aircrew, with an average age of 23 years old. I knew people that served in many theatres of the WW2, from all the services, from company ‘E’ (Band of Brothers), sailors, aviators, and others. The level of responsibility heaped upon so many, at such a young age is beyond belief.

There were persons born in the Great Depression of the 1930’s that were no slouches either. This is the generation that provided the engineers of the NASA years of the 1960’s. Gene Kranz reported that the average of the Apollo 11 flight controllers, was 28 years old.

Today the generation of the Millennials is the most educated generation in history yet in too many ways less capable than their predecessor, regarding a visceral understanding of the universe, and the ability to get things done. Raised by helicopter schools and parents, many fear this generation is losing their ‘grit.’ With all due respect to those Millennials that do have significant responsibilities, too many have not received the right kind of education.  We have moved from a world of 23-year-old pilots on dangerous missions, kids growing up on a farm with responsibility, to a new world of big box hardware stores giving lessons on “how to use a hammer” and “how to hang a picture.” Far too many people no longer understand the world and how to survive by making, they just consume things.

When I was a kid in elementary school, I was an outlier. I got along with everyone quite well, but I was a bit different. I was the kid that read everything in sight, on a vast array of subjects. I was the go-to guy on questions that required knowledge. The school was not so good, with the rote work, and a level of teaching and learning that was uninteresting to me. For most of my K-12 academic career, the school provided some basics, but no real deep learning. In my 1st through 6th-grade elementary school, each grade level had three classes, fast, medium, and slow, in the vernacular of the day. I was in the fast-class, and it was dull and rote to me.

From the time I was in 3rd grade to until I graduated high school, I had to work like a dog, helping support the family farm and pay off the mortgage. To some people, I was considered ‘privileged,’ being the son of a landowning farmer. At the end of the day, the hired hands recognized that I had to work like mad, along with all the rest of the crew. I didn’t feel privileged at all. If being privileged meant working all day on a farm, I didn’t want any part of it. Farming is not the life for me.

In the second grade, the teacher noticed I had reading problems, and I was getting headaches. I needed glasses. In those days all the doctors were in Conway, the county seat. Even in Myrtle Beach, you had to go to Conway to see a doctor. My mom took me across the street from the elementary school to the eye doctor. When the doctor learned that I was obsessed with technology and space and NASA and such, he informed me that I had just missed Wernher Von Braun, an aerospace engineer and one of the architects of the space program.  He was vacationing at the beach and lost his eyeglasses in the surf.

People didn’t know what STEM was. That word and not yet been invented. But it didn’t matter; it was what I wanted to do, I didn’t need a word to tell me. I felt that I was the only person around that was intensely interested in STEM pursuits. As soon as I learned to read and how to ride a bike, I had a plan. The internet and Google had not been invented, but I had the next best thing. The town had a library. My mom took me to the library. They gave me a library card and trained me on how to find books. I got a bicycle for Christmas, with a basket to on the front to carry stacks of books. Anytime I wanted, I could ride my bike, through the neighborhoods full of majestic 350-year-old live oak trees, draped with Spanish moss, to the mountain of knowledge, the Horry County Library. In those days I could see circulation card in the back of the book and see who shared my interests. Unfortunately, not so many people when it came to the STEM books.

I read almost all the books on physical, earth, life, planetary sciences; astronomy, electronics, physics, automotive repair, radio, steam engines, history of science, technology, medicine, and the arts, some history, and some literature. In 2nd grade, our family bought a set of World Book Encyclopedias. My mom was the administrative assistant to the school district superintendent. The district had a form of ‘new media’ in the way of a substantial 16mm educational and newsreel film collection. It would probably not pass muster today, but back when the district had excess capacity, I managed to have an RCA Model 400 16mm projector setup in our home and watched an untold quantity of films. It wasn’t Discovery Education or Kahn Academy, but it was the best we could get.

At the library, I had magazines such as Aviation Week & Space Technology, and at home National Geographic, Popular Electronics, Popular Mechanics, and others. When not learning something from film, books, or magazines, I was trying to invent and build things, gadgets, gizmos, machines, and radios.

In 1962, the University of South Carolina – Coastal Carolina, broke ground a few miles down the road, and a year later their student body of 110 students moved in. By the time I got to the 6th grade, I had attained access to that library also.

My elementary and high school were built at the turn of the century. They were made of brick and locally grown ancient growth longleaf pine that tended to be more like ‘fat lighter’ These were the trees that produced the turpentine and naval pine stores used to seal the wooden ships of the British Empire. Years after I passed through high school, it caught fire late in the night. All the fire trucks from four counties drained the city water system trying to put this inferno of fire out but to no avail. From a distance, it looked like the flames were reaching for the moon.

Starting in the 5th grade, I went to work on the farm during the summers and often after school. We lived in town, but our farm was 16 miles away, way off in the country. One midday I had to go to the farm with my parents to see how a project was coming along. There was one remaining tenant farmer on the land, there since 1945, and planned to remain till he passed. Indoor plumbing was being installed in his house, replacing an outhouse and an outdoor pump. I was unhappy about the trip as I was busy following the Apollo program. It was Sunday, July 20th, 1969.  Later that day, the tenant farmer flipped the switch for the electric pump and turned the faucet handle. He had new indoor plumbing, and a couple of hours later, at 4:17 PM EST, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became to first humans to land on the moon.

Bored with school and looking for something to do, while I was in high school I went to the local technical college at night, got trained as an Emergency Medical Technician, and took some electronics courses to kill time. In my senior year, I attended USC Coastal Carolina as a joint enrollment student. I didn’t know what computer programming was, but someone told me his brother took the course, and it was fun, so I signed up for a sophomore level course, and it was excellent.

As I was finishing 12th grade and preparing to graduate, I met someone that had moved to town, a retired Georgia Tech professor. He told me that when I went to Tech, I would meet many people like me. Each one was the brightest kid out of their town in 30 years. And a third of them wasn’t going to make it.

So, there we have it. Despite the schools not being very interesting, and scraping the bottom of educational attainment as compared to other states, there were people, well known and unknown, that have managed to achieve quite a bit of success.

I bundled up my gear and went off the Georgia Tech in 1975, and in just over a year, I flunked out and was invited to depart the Institute.

I was considered to be the smart one. I was the person that seemed to know a lot. I was the STEM guy. I had the books, the bike with the basket, the libraries. I had the projector and the films, and the encyclopedias. I had the chemistry set and the workshop and labs I built. I had access to the best resources that this little town had to offer.

If I, what some people considered the smartest, best-educated kid in town flunked out of college, what about all the other kids in town? What of the kids that don’t have access to the resources I had, what of the African-American kids that live in Big Jo’s neighborhood, and the white kids in the country-side with the parents with the 8th-grade education.

Houston, we have a problem!!

An hour northeast of Conway, there was a kid that had a bit of trouble making it onto his high school varsity basketball team. He eventually perfected his game, and Michael Jordan became one of the great players of basketball. A few miles west, in a tobacco town of 300 people, there was a bright kid, that at the age of 12 worked in his dad’s bar selling beer, liquor, and tuna sandwiches. This guy, Charles Edge left and went to work for Howard Hughes, and in the 1950’s developed an electromechanical computer that flew a military aircraft cross country, like the similar project from the MIT Draper Lab. Another fifteen miles west, the same time I went to off to college, another engineering student started also Georgia Tech, and on to Silicon Valley to design integrated circuits for the new computer revolution. A few miles north of the farm town of Dillon, there emerged Ben Bernanke, who became Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, during the financial crisis of the late 2000’s. Just west in another tobacco farming town, there was Ron McNair, physicist and NASA astronaut that died on the Space Shuttle Challenger. In the upstate, were no tobacco towns, but mill towns. My grandmother lived in the mill town of Lancaster, and a family she knew had a son, Charles Duke, NASA Apollo 16 astronaut, and the 10th and youngest person to walk on the moon.

In retrospect, I see talent in every town, that is undeveloped and lost, and others that claw their way out of town and achieve some success. How do we fix this ecosystem so students can make progress? Back then I had no idea. But now I do.