PHOTOILLUSTRATION; JUSTIN GUARIGLIA/EIGHTFISH; Foreign Policy.
1961 saw the U.S publication of a book by Arthur S. Trace Jr. called What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't. It argued that American schoolchildren were falling behind their Soviet counterparts and unless the country's education system was overhauled, American would be overtaken.
Today, similar fears are expressed about America falling behind China - fears that are bound up, of course, with anxieties about America's decline as a global power. It's certainly true that China and other Asian countries are catching up on some measures surpassing the US. But as Ben Wildavsky argues in this excellent article for Foreign Policy, there is as little need to panic now as there was in 1961.
It doesn't matter, says Wildavsky, if America is falling behind in relative terms. That's inevitable, given how far ahead they were in the first place. America's students have always been somewhere near the middle of the global (industrialised) pack anyway; it's a myth that America 'used to lead the world' in educational standards. What matters is that the education of America's children isn't declining or stagnating in absolute terms - and so far that's not happening.
Similarly, although the share of international students attending America's universities has fallen, this is mainly a function of increased global mobility generally: there are just more students choosing to study in a country other than their own.
The FP piece chimes with James Fallows's lengthy but very readable investigation of the bigger question of whether America is in decline or not, from last year. Fallows - who lived in China for years - concluded that rumours of the end of America's economic and military dominance were exaggerated. It retains big advantages over China, India and other emerging powers, the most important of which is its openness as a society, and therefore its ability to attract and assimilate talented people from around the world. This was one of the most striking paragraphs from his piece:
Each fall, Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University produces a ranking of the world’s universities based mainly on scientific-research papers. All such rankings are imprecise, but the pattern is clear. Of the top 20 on the latest list, 17 are American, the exceptions being Cambridge (No. 4), Oxford (No. 10), and the University of Tokyo (No. 20). Of the top 100 in the world, zero are Chinese.
Of course, there are significant problems with America's education system that need to be solved. But we can put aside the idea that it's in a race with China. Education, as Wildavsky points out, is not a zero-sum game in which every winner creates a loser. Neither is global economics. The more brilliant people China educates, the more innovations it produces, the more wealth is generated for everyone in the global economy, including Americans.
Link to Foreign Policy article.
Link to Fallows.
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Posted by: kiralık devremülkler | March 19, 2011 at 06:52 PM