What's Happened to the Great American Century?
The twentieth century is often times referred to as the "Great American Century" -- the period of time when America was the world leader on a number of fronts. During this century, the world looked to America as the international problem solver and as the leader in the global economy. Americans too relished the fact that the twentieth century made the American dream possible -- national economic prosperity and a great sense of pride gave the family of four the availability to own the suburban house with a dog and a white picket fence.
America was also the global leader in education. We made it possible for every child to get a good quality education -- an education that, when complete, would get them a good paying job and the ability to provide for their family. Education policies during the 20th century brought democracy to education with programs like the G.I bill. We also responded to the outcry that challenged our leadership positions when the Soviets launched the space race with Sputnik -- we rallied to a common cause and invested in science, technology, math and engineering. In short, we knew collectively that educational achievement and intellectual development paved the groundwork for our economic success.
As the 20th Century came to a close, Americans started to become too comfortable with the fact that they were the global leader. It's almost as if we believed we were invincible. We've come to assume that the American dream was guaranteed no matter how hard or how little we worked.
However, as we lapsed into arrogance, the world grew hungry for the success that we as Americas became accustomed too. As The Washington Post , LA Times, NY Times and International Herald Tribune all point out: the emerging economies of the Asias are forecasted to exponentially grow in the nearing future and by some predications pass the United States economy by 2050. If we don't get our act together the next hundred years will not be as prosperous as the last hundred years.
Over the last 25 years, while countries like India, China and Korea have restructured and significantly improved their educational system, ours has stagnated. Just consider this -- America's 15-year-olds are significantly below average in math and science. Out of the 30 countries participating in the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment America's 15-year-olds ranked 25th in math and 21st in science. This failure directly links to the strength of our economic competitiveness. Our sons and daughters are not just competing for jobs with their classmates and their neighbors; they are also competing with the Japanese, Chinese, Indians and everyone else on the other side of the globe. According to a leading economist, this crisis in education is costing us at least a trillion dollars let alone causing America to lose ground as its workforce competes in the global marketplace.
There's been a lot of speculation and debate over why our schools aren't working, but a better question ought to be why aren't more Americans alarmed that our education system is declining? Maybe it's because they don't know or understand the problem. Or maybe it's because the politicians are afraid of the unions, interest groups and ideologues. Whatever it is, we'd better put our collective heads together and find a solution.
We need that same great purpose that propelled us past the Soviets in the '60s -- we need a call to enter "a new frontier." We need presidential leadership that will rally the country around the common goal of raising our standards and making us more competitive in the global economy.
And this is how we can start:
First, we need to implement higher standards for our students. America's low education standards prevent our students from reaching their fullest potential and imperil out nation's economic security. We need to benchmark our standards against the top countries in the world to ensure that America is on pace to compete in the global marketplace. Finally, we need assessments to guarantee that our student's are mastering the material they need to known in order to advance to the next grade level. From these standards we need to test to guarantee that are students are mastering the material they need to advance to the next grade level.
Second, we need effective teachers in every classroom. It should come as no surprise that America's schools will need to hire nearly 3 million new teachers over the next decade, and they must do so amidst a fierce battle for human capital in an ultra-competitive global society. We have both a challenge and an opportunity before us. We cannot continue to fail children because recruiting and retaining new teachers is too hard. We need to enable teachers to improve their skills, measure teachers' performance in the classroom, and pay them more if they produce superior results or take on challenging assignments.
Finally, we need to have student's spend more quality time in the classroom. Students in other nations are working harder, working longer, and learning more than our students. On average, students in nations participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study spent 193 days annually in school, compared with only 180 in the U.S. Over 12 years, this deficit translates into a gap of nearly one full school year. If we want to have a prayer of keeping our kids at the top of the global food chain, somethings got to give.
Marc Lampkin is the Executive Director of Strong American Schools, an unprecedented national public awareness and action campaign aimed at elevating education to the top of the nation's domestic priorities during the 2008 presidential election and beyond. Visit
www.Edin08.com to find out more.
Loading comments…
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
Sometimes I wonder if we aren't taking the wrong approach to education of the young.
We've tried making their educational experience more meaningful, richer, more nuanced. We've tried buying them off. Still, they're coming up stupid.
I'm a firm believer in the George Costanza Theory of Life strategy: If everything you try comes up snake-eyes, then doing the exact opposite will absolutely work.
I propose that if any student flunks a test or gets lower than a C in any course, kick their butt out of school. Let their family decide on what to do with their worthless ass. If it means flipping burgers or living in a cardboard box, so be it. More opportunity in the schools for those who want to learn; more believable incentive to perform for the current slackers.
Hey, it could work.
HuffPost's Pick
I have spent some time in China and it was obvious, at least to me, why so many of the urban Chinese kids performed well in school. It was not that China spent more on kids, or had small class sizes, or even had fantastic teachers. It was that most Chinese kids were not nearly as distracted by video games, television, sex, drugs, and rock and roll and other modern forms of music, though all that is beginning to change.
My wife and I have an 11 year-old son in the sixth grade who performs well in all subjects and even performs at a highschool level in math. And that is primarily because, so far, we have kept him from becoming distracted. We know we are swimming upstream, however, given current US culture, and we do not know how much longer we can protect him, especially in a culture where protecting children is considered by many to be inappropriate. But with the government making little effort to protect children from harmful or distracting influences, the parents are all that the kids have standing between them and a future filled with failure and sorrow. And if it is both easy and politically correct to stand aside and offer one's children up to those who may profit from corrupting them, not many parents are going to stand in the way.
And that is my politically incorrect opinion.
I suggest that the reason why we had a strong educational system was that there was a need for it: in the factory you had to be smart.
America was strong at that time because America Produced. It produced most of what it needed and had produce to spare, which it sold. It is from this position of fundamental economic strength that it prospered, and deserved to do so.
It is by exactly the same principles that other nations around us are prospering ... as they, too, deserve to do. But we can no longer look to these people as the active suppliers to our passivity, as though we were really WERE "the masters of the world" for whom such is "our due." We're a nation of about 320 million people and we'd better resume earning our own keep.
If the island nation of Peehpee started printing 96,000 Drupals a second, calling it their official currency and leaning upon a moldy old treaty in which someone once agreed that henceforth all the world's oil must be bought-and-sold in Drupals and thus flooding the planet with Drupals ... how long would that sort of nonsense be expected to last? Well, in our case it lasted less than forty years but we're strutting around as though it "was our due" that it should last forever. And lately we're just itching to show-off our nucl... our "bunker busters" ... to anyone who doesn't want to accept Drupals and feed us the best.
I certainly respect your ideas, Marc, but I just saw a small video about a school in the Bronx that made me realize what America really needs is a society inclusive enough to make going to school worth it. Please watch this video. It gave me a deeper sense of what the word HOPE means, and how important it is:
http://www
The person who gave it to me said, simply "Something truly amazing is happening! Share this video with everyone you know...." I couldn't agree more.
The suggestion that we need to compete with other and far-away places will take a while to sink in. We don't compete. We dominate. What we don't realize is that it will be easier for those nations with good education systems to resist our domination than it will be for us to catch up to them in education.
Times are changing. The old days of Americans just helping themselves to whatever looked good are disappearing. We need to wake up and grow up. When was the last time you met someone who was looking for greater discipline? Is it any wonder our kids aren't interested in school. Learn for a better future? What future? No wonder we don't talk about peak oil and global warming and overpopulation and scarcity of clean water. If you think our kids aren't paying attention, you are sadly mistaken. When you grow up in a nation dominated by the rule "Take the money and run" you soon learn what it important.
Do the countries which are rapidly catching up to the US have local school systems or national systems?
The US educational system was set up to produce well-educated farmers and a few trained "mechanics" (aka engineers). For reasons why the US is declining, consider the pay differences between physicists and athletes. US movies today denigrate higher education (somethings I'm not "liberal" about).
America, the land of the arrogantly stupid, like Rush Limbaugh, who gets his lines directly from his Neocon masters who planned the New American Century we are now in. Rush then gave the good news to his willfully ignorant dittoheads that reasoning was no longer a requirement. He would tell them what to think. (This was merely a broadening of the original effort; essentially doing the same thing in our universities, but that started earlier and -- for a while -- was quieter.)
There was great cheering. And The Neocons have had their way.
And they plan to keep on having their way. Two of the three presidential candidates are already owned. (But who'd have thought a skinny Black guy could cause them trouble?)
I was at the University of California when Reagan came in to the Governor's office. He said that he wasn't having the State of California pay for students who were protesting. Ironically, he signed my diploma, or stamped his signature on it, as he did or tried to do on many official documents. He literally rubber-stamped Reaganomics, which he admitted he didn't understand. Ronald Reagan did more damage to education than any other president except Bush. There are some really well-educated bloggers but most people are ignorant. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Ronald Reagan and Nancy read their astrology and had psychics tell them what course to follow in world events. He placed the country on high alert once just to shake up the Soviets. My wife was Commander of the Deck at Camp Pendleton Hospital that day. He lost his way in his vision speak about driving down Route One in Big Sur and then...and then...I waited for the vision. I guess that it was Star Wars or some such thing. He never was able to complete his idea. His speeches in favor of Harry Truman were moving. He cared about the working man. But after he married Nancy and the Red Scare came along he was the perfect front man, an actor no less. We are all stupider for him and his vision.
You ask what's happened to America in the last quarter-century? You wish to have some understanding of our failure to compete? Easy. One word. Republicanism.
A very excellent post. Students working harder, working longer, and learning more is essential for twenty-first century skill development and our national competitiveness. But we are not, despite protests to the contrary, a nation that values education for its own sake. In general, Americans have lost any high aspirations or intellectual tastes. Our system of education and our culture discourages us from indulging them and encourages our addiction to inferrior pleasures. We elect "C" students and our response to a national or international crisis is to "go shopping." More than our schools must improve.
Hillary is a case for you. She had a poor record in law school, couldn't pass the DC bar exam, but they want to push her into the White House, and maybe some day onto the Supreme Court.
(If she doesn't get the DEMnom, they'll fall back on Lieberman mentored McCain.)
The primary cause of this is the deliberate dumbing down of education which occurred as a direct result of the protests against the Vietnam war. In the "60s and early "70s, the US government was faced with a relatively educated populace opposed to its foreign policy. The solution to this problem for the government and for Wall Street investors, the actual owners of this country, was clear. It was to narrow public education to rudimentary reading skills, simple Mathematics and minimal Science. Gone were the studies of the Arts, Literature and World History as well as anything else which might lead to having critical analysis skills.
Replacing them also was an onslaught of teachings which were overt boosterism of the godliness of the nation. Nothing in US history ever had any causes; things just happened. The best example of this is how 9/11 could not possibly have anything to do with 50 years of oppressive international intervention by the CIA and US military. We were told, "They hate us for our freedoms" and people actually believed it. An ignorant populace is a docile populace which can be easily manipulated as we all saw in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Make the realm of education so narrow that the citizenry can run the machines, total the accounts and read the propaganda fomented by the government and spread by the corporate media owned by the investor class. Period.
You said it. They want ignorant worker-bees they can push around, who won't make demands or ask tough questions. Reagan was the one who really pulled the plug; remember how incensed he was about the student protests and said they "don't deserve an education"? State-funded college soon disappeared and now most kids who make it through are so encumbered by debt that they're ready to be indentured servants?
You must be logged in to comment. Log in or connect with
