I don't see what part of any of this is like sputnik. From my understanding, the Russians launching sputnik and beating the U.S. to space created a nation wide interest in better science and mathematics education. It also lead the president to create programs to accomplish this.
I haven't yet seen any effective programs to help give students better science and mathematics education.
I found this link in another topic on CD:
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06...try&topic_set=
And this one a few weeks ago about textbooks in schools:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12705167/
It seems to me that while schools and the government are telling us that "Students are loosing interest in Science and mathematics", they're also preventing students from becoming interested in science and mathematics.
Every "chemistry" lab done in middle school was no more exciting than adding food coloring to water. They haven't become much more exciting or informative during the 2 years I've been in high school so far either.
The mathematics textbooks (at least the ones we use) are a joke. In the words of Tom Lehrer in his song "New Math", "See, in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer."
FIRST really is helping to give students an interest in becoming engineers, or in doing jobs related to science and mathematics.
EDIT: Forgot to mention on thing. Somewhere either in the government, or in the schools the belief seems to have arisen that states "Students can't understand science/math unless we dumb it down or make it 'interesting'". Now, there's no problem with making it interesting (that's what FIRST does quite well). But the schools attempt to do this by adding exclamation points to the end of every sentence in textbooks and assuming that we all have the attention spans of 2-year-olds.