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Howdy all. Here's a column from this week's Newsweek that you might find of
some interest...

 

WE ALL HAVE A LOT TO LEARN by Fareed Zakaria

 

Jan. 9, 2006 issue - Last week India was hit by a terror attack that
unsettled the country. A gunman entered the main conference hall of the
Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, tossed four grenades into the
audience and, when the explosives failed, fired his AK-47 at the crowd. One
man, a retired professor of mathematics from one of the Indian Institutes of
Technology, was killed. What has worried some about this attack is not its
scope or planning or effect-all unimpressive-but the target. The terrorists
went after what is increasingly seen as India's core strategic asset for the
21st century: its scientific and technological brain trust. If that becomes
insecure, what will become of India's future?

This small event says a lot about global competition. Traveling around Asia
for most of the past month, I have been struck by the relentless focus on
education. It makes sense. Many of these countries have no natural
resources, other than their people; making them smarter is the only path for
development. China, as always, appears to be moving fastest. When officials
there talk about their plans for future growth, they point out that they
have increased spending on colleges and universities almost tenfold in the
past 10 years. Yale's president, Richard Levin, notes that Peking
University's two state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication lines-each
employing a different technology-outshine anything in the United States.
East Asian countries top virtually every global ranking of students in
science and mathematics.

But one thing puzzles me about these oft-made comparisons. I talked to
Tharman Shanmugaratnam to understand it better. He's the minister of
Education of Singapore, the country that is No. 1 in the global science and
math rankings for schoolchildren. I asked the minister how to explain the
fact that even though Singapore's students do so brilliantly on these tests,
when you look at these same students 10 or 20 years later, few of them are
worldbeaters anymore. Singapore has few truly top-ranked scientists,
entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives or academics. American kids,
by contrast, test much worse in the fourth and eighth grades but seem to do
better later in life and in the real world. Why?

"We both have meritocracies," Shanmugaratnam said. "Yours is a talent
meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the
intellect that we are not able to test well-like creativity, curiosity, a
sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning
that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority.
These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."

Shanmugaratnam also pointed out that American universities are unrivaled
globally-and are getting better. "You have created a public-private
partnership in tertiary education that is amazingly successful. The
government provides massive funding, and private and public colleges
compete, raising everyone's standards." Shanmugaratnam highlighted in
particular the role that American foundations play. "Someone in society has
to be focused on the long term, on maintaining excellence, on raising
quality. You have this array of foundations-in fact, a whole tradition of
civic-minded volunteerism-that fulfills this role. For example, you could
not imagine American advances in biomedical sciences without the Howard
Hughes Foundation."

Singapore is now emphasizing factors other than raw testing skills when
selecting its top students. But cultures are hard to change. A Singaporean
friend recently brought his children back from America and put them in his
country's much-heralded schools. He described the difference. "In the
American school, when my son would speak up, he was applauded and
encouraged. In Singapore, he's seen as pushy and weird. The culture of
making learning something to love and engage in with gusto is totally
absent. Here it is a chore. Work hard, memorize and test well." He took his
child out of the Singapore state school and put him into a private,
Western-style one.

 

Despite all the praise Shanmugaratnam showered on the States, he said that
the U.S. educational system "as a whole has failed." "Unless you are
comfortably middle class or richer," he explained, "you get an education
that is truly second-rate by any standards. Apart from issues of fairness,
what this means is that you never really access the talent of poor, bright
kids. They don't go to good schools and, because of teaching methods that
focus on bringing everyone along, the bright ones are never pushed. In
Singapore we get the poor kid who is very bright and very hungry, and that's
crucial to our success.

"From where I sit, it's not a flat world," Shanmugaratnam concluded. "It's
one of peaks and valleys. The good news for America is that the peaks are
getting higher. But the valleys are getting deeper, and many of them are
also in the United States."

 

Jonah Cohen

Outreach & Public Programs Manager

Science Center of Connecticut

 

"On blind faith they place reliance,

what we need more of is science"

           -MC Hawking

 


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