That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [74]
Home Alone
While the connection between education and economic growth has never been tighter, we don’t want our young people to be educated just so that they can be better workers. We want all citizens to be better educated so they can be, well, better citizens. “We want kids to think critically, to read, to create, but not simply because those things will get them jobs and money,” said Susan Engel, the Williams College teaching expert, “but because a society made up of such people will be a better society. People will make more informed decisions, invent things that help the world rather than harm it, and at least some of the time, put the interests of others ahead of self-interest.”
No question: Education should focus on the whole person—should aim to produce better citizens, not just better test takers. About this, Engel is surely right. If our schools teach American children what it means to be an American citizen, they—and America—will have a much better chance of passing on the American formula for greatness to future generations.
But we simply cannot escape the fact that we as a society have some catching up to do in education generally. When you are trying to catch up, you have to work harder, focus on the fundamentals, and get everyone to pitch in. Give us a country where everyone feels that he or she has a real stake in improving education—where parents are focused on their children’s homework, where neighbors care about the quality of their local schools, where politicians demand that their schools be measured against the standards of our peers, where businesses insist that their schools be among the best in the world, and where students understand just how competitive the world is—and we promise you the best teachers will become even be better, the average ones will improve, and the worst ones will truly stick out.
One of the most wrongheaded movies we can imagine came out in late 2010. It was called Race to Nowhere, and its theme was that suburban American students are under too much pressure. They have to juggle homework, soccer, Facebook, wrestling practice, the school play, the prom, SAT prep, and Advanced Placement exams. Some would call that stress. We would call it misplaced priorities.
Stress? Stress is what you’ll feel when you can’t understand the thick Chinese accent of your first boss out of college—in the only job you are offered.
That will be stress.
SEVEN
Average Is Over
We have a bone to pick with the writers of the movie The Social Network. We take exception to the way they depicted Lawrence Summers, who was the president of Harvard at the time in which the movie is set. At one point, two Harvard students, the twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, go to Summers complaining that a fellow student, Mark Zuckerberg, has stolen their idea for something called “the Facebook.” Summers hears the twins’ tale of woe without a shred of sympathy, then tosses them out with this piece of advice: “Yes, everyone at Harvard is inventing something. Harvard undergraduates believe that inventing a job is better than finding one, so I’ll suggest again that the two of you come up with a new, new project.”
That line is supposed to make Summers look arrogant, unsympathetic, condescending, and clueless. In fact, his point describes perfectly what “better” education should aspire to achieve: ingenuity, creativity, and the inspiration to bring something “extra” to whatever the student winds up doing in the world.
Woody Allen’s dictum that “90 percent of life is just showing up” is no longer true. Just showing up for work will not cut it anymore. Now it is about showing off—not strutting or calling attention to yourself but doing things with an excellence that deserves attention.
America’s economic future will depend on how well we are able to get our whole country to resemble Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, “Where all the women