"What I insist that we do is to refocus our STEM education debates on the right question. And that question is not “Who deserves what"?”. It’s “Who will run the fabs?”."

First, where does he get off "insisting" anything? If he's so gung ho on improving education, why is he wasting his time writing a blog post instead of going out and doing the hard work of actually educating some people?

But even leaving that aside, why do "we" have to debate this question? "We" don't determine who runs the fabs; the companies that own the fabs do. Nor do "we" need to centrally control what education kids get; the fact that we have a huge, bureaucratic, centrally controlled public education system in the US is a bug, not a feature. But not to this author; in fact, he is basically arguing for expanding the central control model of education:

"[T]he notion that the purpose of education should be to discover and elevate natural talent is fundamentally flawed, as the entire previous section of this post argued. Finding a few kids capable of defeating China in a math competition is useless compared to the task of training millions of kids to work in high-tech export industries."

So now the education system is supposed to do job training for specific skills? Didn't that used to be called "apprenticeship"? And didn't it used to be done as a private thing, without having to drag a huge, bloated bureaucracy into the mix?

And what, exactly, is wrong with the idea that education should discover and elevate natural talent? Isn't that exactly what you want if you want to have the best chip fabs? Not to mention all the other good things the article mentions. (The author does argue that the belief in "natural talent" has bad side effects and that what should be focused on instead is "long-term motivation". But then he saws off his own branch by admitting that "what people want to do is ultimately more important than what they’re told to do." And when kids are subjected to education to "improve their long-term motivation", they see it, correctly, as being told to do things they don't want to do. The only handle that any education system can really grasp with a kid is "natural talent"--what do they naturally want to do? What are they naturally interested in? And our regimented, structured, centrally controlled bureaucratic education system is perfectly designed to entirely ignore that input--and not just ignore it when deciding what kids will do, but kill it when it is detected, on the grounds that it's disruptive.)

To this author, the "millions of kids" are just cogs in a machine, to be moved around to wherever the central authority thinks they will do the most good. (But of course he isn't any such thing.)

I'm all for encouraging more kids to go into STEM and to improving the incentives involved so more kids who are interested in STEM will see it as a viable career. But we don't need to make ourselves into China to do that.