An Educational Imperative: The Need to Rectify the Educational Archetype

The statistics are well known: The United States is currently lagging behind the international competition in every category – reading, science, and math.  Out of the 34 countries that were a part of the study, the U.S. ranked 14^th in reading, 17^th in science, and 25^th in math.  That is abysmal, especially since not more than three decades ago the United States was at the forefront of educational rankings and was a country to be emulated.  U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press that, “This is an absolute wake-up call for America” and that, “We have to get much more serious about investing in education.”  Duncan is right, those stats should be a resounding wake-up call, but money alone is not the remedy.

            Do you know why the Chinese surpassed us in the educational rankings?  As the   Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Secretary General Angel Gurria cites, it is their emphasis on the importance of education and a curriculum that is relevant to everyday life.  He states: “They don’t produce children who know the matters by heart.  They’re educated to understand and face the challenges of real life.”  How did the Chinese accomplish this?  Well it wasn’t because of money since the GDP per capita for Shanghai --where sample was taken -- was well below the OECD average, which accentuates the notion that a low-income area does not necessarily correlate to poor educational performance.  The irony is that the United States does reign supreme in one area – dollars spent per student.  Currently the United States ranks 2^nd in spending per student – right behind Luxembourg – while countries like Estonia and Poland spend half of what the U.S. does and still gets the same educational output.  Colloquially, that means the United States has a terrible return on investment and needs to take a couple finance classes to figure out how to maximize their return.  Furthermore, what is truly disturbing is the fact that it is well known what a great educational system can do for a country’s economy.  For example, if the United States boosted its scores on the international evaluation by an average of 25 points over the next 20 years, it is estimated that there would be a gain of $41 trillion in the U.S economy over the lifetime of the generation born in 2010 (estimation from Stanford University and OECD).  This concept also applies to the micro level: For every dollar invested by the state of Virginia into higher education, it spurs $13.31 in economic output and $1.39 in tax revenue (statistic from Grow By Degrees). 

            So how can the United States become more competitive while simultaneously reducing cost per student?  This is the fundamental question since the United States in not in a position to significantly raise their educational investment when they have other pertinent priorities at hand (e.g. managing a deficit of $16 trillion, three overseas conflicts/wars, dubious job market, precarious economy, etc.).  What the United State’s educational system should do is take a hard look in the mirror; they need to realize that the traditional, assembly-line style education children are receiving is pernicious to the economy, is stifling intellectual creativity, and needs to be modified.  Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert, gave a lecture titled “Changing Education Paradigms” where he delineated the history of our educational system and expounded why it is not applicable to the 21^st century.  Robinson elucidated: “The current system of education was designed, conceived, and structured for a different age.  It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution.”  To clarify, our educational system was constructed by the intellectual elite of the enlightenment during a time when there was an economic imperative for skilled labor.  Additionally, when this system originated, a naïve conception of intelligence was formulated – one that focuses only on academic ability – and thus has created a false dichotomy of academic people and non-academic people when measuring intelligence.  It is because of this false notion of intelligence that many children feel segregated from a school’s primary intent – to learn.  Contemporary educational institutions are about conformity – this is evident with the rise of standardized testing – and are essentially destroying children’s ability to engage in divergent thinking, lateral thinking, spontaneous thinking, etc.  In the real world, there is hardly ever one answer to a problem, and more often than not the problem is so ambiguously defined that there is no readily available answer to it and that is when cognitive creativity becomes an unquantifiable value. 

            In Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat, he claims that while we were sleeping globalization 3.0 took place.  To summarize, he postulates that a new age of globalization has occurred and has irrevocably changed the global economic landscape; thus in effect forever altering how we should perceive our educational apparatus.  Friedman delineates ten “flatteners” in his book and I will for brevity name three: First, workflow software – which allowed for multiple forms of collaboration software to emerge.  Second, uploading – which consists of blogging, Wikipedia, and open source software.  Third, informing – the creation of Google transformed how people find and interact with information.  Now why hasn’t our educational apparatus undergone a metamorphosis as well?  It would be disingenuous to say that globalization 3.0 was inconsequential, so why is our educational apparatus so resistant to evolve?  Why can’t we take the next step?  The rational answer is that it is due partly to red tape, money, and the inability to break away from tradition.  But if we are not willing to take risks, then we are suffocating the intellectual potential and possible prowess of our younger generations and inevitably placing them in an economic quagmire. 

            President Obama said in a speech the other day -- while discussing his new $447 billion jobs plan -- that the United States was in a “national crisis”.  Well right now I believe we are in an “educational crisis”.  Fortunately to fix this problem we do not need Ivy League economists debating the merits of Keynesian and Austrian economics, but rather we simply need to go to the problem – the students.  We should ask them what they want to learn, what classes should be offered, and how they want to meet their academic requirements.  The biggest failures in the educational system are the inability to realize that there is more than one path; that a student should be liberated from a restrictive, standardized methodology; and that technology is god.  As Mark Twain once said, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”