DATE: Thursday, October 9, 1997             TAG: 9710090009

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: Patrick Lackey

                                            LENGTH:   89 lines

EDUCATION SPUTNIK SCARED A NATION INTO GIVING ME A SCHOLARSHIP

Growing up in little Kansas towns in the '50s, I knew that Americans had invented everything that mattered. The wind-rustled cottonwood trees told me, ``Americans invented everything that matters.''

Another thing I knew was that the Russians claimed to have invented everything, even baseball. What a joke! Baseball was America's game. Television? Sure the Russians said they invented it, but everybody knew Americans created TV.

What I knew was what all Kansans knew: America was first and best and biggest at everything except maybe making vodka. Russia was a distant second.

People today who aren't at least in their 50s surely cannot appreciate the shock that Americans like me felt when Russia launched the first satellite to orbit Earth, 40 years ago. For three months, we could see that little round sucker up in dark space taunting us. It circled the globe every 95 minutes. Who could imagine such speed? Finally it burned up in the atmosphere. Good riddance.

America entered the space race in earnest, but our rockets kept blowing up. They became a joke. Finally, nearly four months later, we orbited a satellite.

But then in April 1961, a Russian cosmonaut orbited Earth while we were still launching chimps. What was going on here? The world was upside-down.

It might have been that very month that I, a senior at Belleville High School, was handed a science scholarship. A million-dollar gift wouldn't have surprised me any more. I had taken a couple of science courses, but I'd never mentioned to anybody that I had any interest in science. In fact, I had no idea what chemists did, other than mix liquids in test tubes and observe as they changed color.

None of that mattered. The nation was in such a panic that science scholarships were being handed out like candy.

In the rush to turn American youths into scientists, mistakes were made. I was one of them. After a semester and a half as a chemist, spending entire afternoons in a lab, I switched my major to music. But darn it, America was first to the moon, eight years later. The panic bore fruit.

Now leap ahead to the summer of 1984. I'm putting out an alumni publication for The University of Iowa when students stage a mass protest in front of a campus building. Too few of their instructors, they say, speak understandable English.

By 1984, the Sputnik scare is so far behind us that American students seems to have lost interest in engineering and, to a lesser degree, in science. For one thing, the courses are hard. Across the nation, graduate classes at engineering schools are filled with foreigners, usually Asian. Those graduate students teach undergraduate courses that contain Americans, but rare is the American graduate student in engineering.

I was affected by that student protest because I attempted to run a photograph of it in the alumni publication. My boss said I couldn't, so I quit in a self-righteous huff. The next thing I knew, I was working at The Virginian-Pilot.

Which brings us to the present. The Sputnik scare has receded even farther into the past, except for a spate of recent stories on its 40th anniversary.

But it seems to me that the nation has been shaken awake, once more, by a scare - this time from world competition.

Our options, now, are two:

Work cheaper than other workers around the world.

Work smarter than other workers around the world.

The second option pays better.

I would like to think the nation is responding to the scare of world competition, even as it responded to the scare of Sputnik (a name that brings to mind doughnuts or potatoes). Our response to the new scare is too slow, of course. Tens of thousands of high-tech jobs are going unfilled because too few people have been trained for them. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that some companies are buying other companies simply because that's the cheapest and quickest way to acquire trained workers.

When the two candidates for Virginia governor debated each other earlier this week, neither demonstrated an inkling of understanding of the challenges facing Virginia and the nation.

Nonetheless, now is an excellent time for another good old-fashioned national panic, with engineering, science and computer scholarships flowing through the halls of our high schools.

But training the best and the brightest isn't good enough anymore. Nearly everybody seeking a middle-class life today needs skills that have to come from education. Future Navy recruitment posters may well say, ``Only the educated need apply.''

So we face a more daunting challenge today than when Sputnik went up. Obviously we need to train terrific teachers and to compensate them adequately. And somehow parents need to instill in youths a love of learning and the kind of curiosity that is not satisfied by watching TV or gossiping with neighbors. We need people who will continue to learn for their entire lives. They'll have to to keep up. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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