&#62;The Pentagon’s far-out research arm Darpa is soliciting 
&#62;proposals for initiatives that would attract teens to 
&#62;careers in science, technology, engineering and math 
&#62;(STEM), with an emphasis on computing.<p>_Teaching_ these subjects to teens would probably be a good start.<p>I'm being serious. The junk that is taught in most schools (and I'm Canadian: our education system is supposedly better than the US) and absurdly labeled these subjects is a huge part of the problem.<p>Math is taught like magic. Experiments have been banned from the science classroom. Computer science classes teach typing.<p>I'm exaggerating a little: math occasionally gets explanations, science may occasionally have a very simple experiment, computer science students may learn some programing. But those are the exception, not the rule.<p>It's utterly broken.