Education is Everybody's Responsibility

Abstract

Statistics education should be a vital concern of anyone who cares about the future of statistics or statisticians, or who employs statisticians. Who should be educated and for what purposes? There is statistics education for those who will become professional statisticians, for those in other areas or professions who will use statistics fairly seriously, and statistics education to provide general life skills and enable an educated citizenry to participate in societal debates which involve arguments based upon data. Every section of ISI has vital interests in at least one of these areas.

Statistics education provides a training ground, a recruiting ground and a selling ground. It is to the advantage of us all if more of the best and brightest come into statistics education systems and leave it better educated, with better developed thinking skills, and a greater appreciation for the power of statistics. Better and better-educated people have a greater impact, both practical and intellectual, and increase the demand for the perceived sources of their success. But statistics is not just for an elite. Society at large will benefit if a broad cross-section of students emerge statistically literate and with an appreciation for the power of statistics and the desirability of decisions being made on the basis of solid data. An introduction to some of the issues involved can be gained from Wild (1994), Moore (1998), Wild & Pfannkuch (1999), Gal (2002), and Scheaffer (2002).