Tom Friedman wrote a long piece in last Sunday's New York Times magazine, It's a Flat World, After All. His points were generally pretty good. Technology, especially the internet, have allowed hard working and talented Chinese, Indians, Eastern Europeans, etc, to compete on a relatively flat playing field with American (and Western European) youngsters. He proceeds to compare our current efforts at educating our children unfavorably with the efforts of our competition. This is all perfectly reasonable; in the article Friedman suggests we exhort our children to work harder in school.
We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''
This is good advice, though hardly likely to turn the tide. Yesterday morning, I was lucky enough to hear him discuss this article and his forthcoming book on an AM radio show. He repeated his advice for our children to work harder, all well and good, right up until he took the plunge into the ideological pool and drowned. Surprising no one, Tom Friedman suggested that responsibility for the poor preparedness of our children lies directly at the feet of George Bush. Apparently the President has not been using the bully pulpit to start a new high tech Apollo project and has not directed large sums of money at training math, science, and engineering students. He glossed over the fact that there is more money for education than ever before and there are no studies proving, or even strongly suggesting, that more money for public school education equates to better educated youngsters. In short, in his effort to implicate the Bush administration, which, while it has pushed the idea of raising standards, has not been speaking enough about this issue (neither has any Democrat, for that matter), Freidman manages to completely miss an opportunity to address some real problems in our pedagogy.
Allow me a moment to digress. At home, we have a Peach-fronted Conure, a small parrot, which has lived with us since it was about 6 weeks old. It can speak a few words and is considered one of the brighter members of the Psittacidae family. Research has suggested that bird brains are in fact, fairly complex structures with more potential and ability than once thought. When she was young (birds are notoriously difficult to sex for non-avians, but she has been labeled a female in our house despite a glaring lack of egg production), we struggled with ways to keep it locked in its cage during the day, not wanting a parrot flying loose in the house all day long. Momo could open any arrangement of paper clip locks we could devise. She would only stay in her cage when she felt like it. Over time, an interesting dynamic developed. Momo knew that I was the principal supplier of food and water. In the wild, when hungry, a bird has to expend some energy and fly around, looking for food. Momo had the ability to get out of the cage and fly into the kitchen, where with minimal effort, she would see the fruit bowl; with very little work, she would have all the food she could want, though not her preferred sunflower seeds. Momo never did this. Instead, when I would arrive home, Momo would immediately begin a noxious squawk, which would continue until I came to the cage and removed the food cups and water bowl. Momo would wait silently and patiently until I returned with the food. Apparently, it required less effort to scream at me to get her food than to get out of the cage and fly off to get her own food. There is nothing unusual or inexplicable about this. Animals, and people, will do the least amount of work required in order to get what they want. This is so obvious it has needed to be confirmed and reconfirmed by academics repeatedly, for the last 50 years, yet various powerful constituencies seem to continually forget this basic attribute of living creatures.
Communism failed precisely because of this aspect of human nature. Once you declare to each according to his needs (an entitlement), the second part of the aphorism becomes problematic. If the idea is to get from each according to his ability, it is foolhardy to neglect the fact that ability is subject to multiple factors, everything from innate ability to perform the task, to motivation, current state of the organism, and especially, have I mentioned, motivation.
The back door efforts to equalize outcomes in our culture continue apace. The New York Regents, in the name of diversity, have lowered the passing grade on Regents Exams to 55. While this, in theory, should not affect the most talented youngsters (unfortunately, the lowering of expectations tends to creep up the ladder; grade inflation lowers expectations and is endemic) the less skilled are tremendously affected. It takes minimal effort to attain a 55 on a Regent's Exam (which has already been simplified more thanonce). The only way to fail is to not work at all, or to be extremely limited in intellectual ability, in which case an academic track would seem to be a poor fit. The current trends, the combination of affirmative action, political correctness, the self esteem movement (dangerous nonsense) and various other cultural determinants, conspire to tell a child who has no academic ability that he or she has all it takes to get a High School diploma, which then becomes a meaningless piece of paper, which lowers the incentive level for the next class.
The unintended consequences of the noble, liberal, efforts to lift people from poverty now have us facing a severe skills deficit in our younger generation; sadly, most of our children, because of our misguided efforts to protect their self esteem by never telling them they are doing poorly, have no clue how unprepared they are for a competitive world. Since reality can be denied only for a limited time, they are likely to find out in very painful ways.
Cultures are extraordinarily complex and like all complex systems, unintended consequences of all actions are the rule, not the exception.
Recent Comments