When I grow up I now want to be… a scientist

Slightly more kids in the world want to be a scientist this year than last year.

It turns out that when I wrote a couple of days ago about the Small Voices, Big Dreams Report on children around the World I was looking at the 2011 report. To be fair to myself of two days ago, so was everyone else as the report’s publishers hadn’t put the 2012 one up on the Web yet. And now they have.

So the big difference I can see is that, in the course of 12 months, scientist and engineer have got on to the list of what kids want to be when they grow up.

Before anyone gets too excited the bulk of kids in the developed world still want to be a professional athlete or an entertainer. But across the globe 2 per cent say they want to be an engineer and 2 per cent want to be a scientist. I have a feeling, though, that this change may be more due to some subtlety in the survey process rather than a radical change in priorities. In the developed world 4 per cent of kids now list scientist as their profession of choice – personally I count that as a pretty healthy number in the circumstances.

The Report continues to make interesting reading. It occurs to me Small Voices, Big Dreams ought to be compulsory reading in schools – what better way to gain an insight into how fortunate kids in Australia really are than to see what kids in developing countries rate as priorities and issues.

The 2012 Report is downloadable here.

See here for the article, from two days ago, on the 2011 report.

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