Do Better Schools Make a Better Nation?
by Tamim Ansary
MSN Encarta Article

Undoubtedly education has something to do with national prosperity--in a long-term way. Obviously, better-educated citizens build better and stronger societies.

But does the state of a nation's schools correlate to specific national problems? Can the state of the schools, for example, cause or prevent recessions? That's not so obvious.

Consider Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. The Soviet achievement certainly pushed the United States toward school reform. Twelve years later, the United States landed a man on the Moon and thus, essentially, won the space race.

But did school reform have anything to do with it? Unlikely.

The post-Sputnik educational reforms took a few years to get going. Kids who started school in time to benefit from those reforms were still in high school in 1969. Besides, the Apollo program had been underway for years. The scientists who put Americans on the Moon must have been products of the old system, the "failing" one pilloried by critics such as Admiral Hyman Rickover in his book Education and Freedom.

Nerds and nations

What about the 1983 study, A Nation at Risk? That document was drafted in specific response to the growing economic might of Japan. Then in the 1990s, Japan's stock market collapsed, its growth rate dropped nearly to zero, and it lost over a million manufacturing jobs.

In that same period, the United States went through the longest continuous economic boom in its post-war history, a boom fueled largely by technologies young Americans invented and developed in the late 1980s: the personal computer, the mouse, the Internet, and all the rest of it.

But again, educational reforms triggered by A Nation at Risk could not have been responsible. Those reforms were barely getting started when American nerds began changing the world, nerds who must have come out of the very schools A Nation at Risk had savaged: These were the students who (supposedly) couldn't read, write, or spell their own names.

No one came forward at that point to give the schools any credit for America's flourishing economy. No commission was formed to study what the schools must have been doing right so that those qualities could be promoted and developed further.

Not enough engineers?

Now, a commission headed by a former CEO of Lockheed Martin warns us that India is producing five times as many engineers as the United States, and China nearly ten times as many.

True. But is it because their schools are better? India and China both send as many students to America as our universities can absorb. About 50 percent of engineering PhDs earned in America go to foreign students. If their schools are better, why do they come here?

The 2006 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm lists various "worrisome indicators" about the state of American education including this one: In China, 59 percent of undergraduates major in science or engineering. In the United States only 32 percent do.

Is that disparity because the schools are failing? Maybe American students are making considered choices. These kids grew up in the 1990s, a decade that began with post-Cold War reductions in the military that drove hordes of scientists and engineers into the job market to compete with new graduates. The media was reporting a glut of engineers and scientists then. The New York Times said even Caltech graduates couldn't get offers.

And the decade ended with the dot-com collapse.

There's another factor, however, that no one is talking about even though it's as obvious as the nose no one sees on their own face. In developing countries racing to catch up with the industrialized west, scientists and engineers are considered glamorous. Kids want to grow up to be them. If they do, they're dead-bang definitely in the country's elite.

In the United States, it's athletes, musicians, and movie stars who are glamorous. That's what kids want to be when they grow up. As a fallback choice, they want to be millionaire entrepreneurs who hire and fire engineers.

When the commission reports that only 32 percent of American students are majoring in science, they fail to note what that means: 68 percent are majoring in something else. What is that something else? Shouldn't we ask before we herd students toward some different dream? Can we even change what people dream? Should we?

This is the problem with the Chicken Little approach to school reform. If we assume too easily that our schools do nothing right, we're apt to scrap everything we do in favor of whatever model our most successful competitors are using.

If we were doing something right, that baby's gone with the bath water.

What if we'd pursued this approach to the hilt after Sputnik? We would have redirected vast national resources into producing scientists and engineers, as the Soviets did. We could have been where the Soviet Union is today.

Where is that, by the way? I can't seem to find the Soviet Union on a map.