Glenn Reynolds
SPELLBOUND, OUTBOUND, AND SCHOOLBOUND
In my last post about the Spelling Bee documentary, Spellbound, I noted that smart kids often feel isolated, and that even though it's cooler to be a geek than it used to be, smartness and hard work aren't especially valued in middle school and high school. You can certainly see that in Spellbound. You might also notice that many of the spelling finalists are from immigrant families. Two, in fact, are from India, where smartness and hard work are very highly valued indeed. (Perhaps too highly, or at least too harshly -- one contestant's father remarks that you don't get second chances in India.)
But I couldn't help thinking about that as I read Dan Pink's cover story in this month's Wired about outsourcing. The Wired cover features an Indian woman as "the new face of the silicon age," and the piece makes clear that Americans need to be focusing more on valuing smartness and hard work. As a sidebar piece by Chris Anderson puts it, India represents a "practically infinite pool of smart, educated, English-speaking people eager to work." And behind India, there's China.
So what's going on in America? Nothing that should frighten the Indians too much. Oh, there's some talk of legislation to limit outsourcing, but that won't work -- and, if it does, will simply constitute a cure worse than the disease. Or, we could be working to make our education system more challenging and effective, encouraging our kids to work harder, and develop their intelligence.
We're certainly not doing that. In Nashville, schools have stopped posting the honor roll. In other schools, cheating is routinely winked at, to the point where a speaker on academic dishonesty reports that she was practically laughed off the stage:
I explored causation for my failure. The motivational speaker, the negative attitude of some administrators, and the general setting of hundreds of juniors and seniors in one room contributed to the debacle.
But, they laughed, booed and ignored me because they know ethics don't matter. Last year several students at this school cheated on a math final. When the instructor proposed a penalty, the parents protested mightily. No action was taken against the students.
The school has a culture of looking the other way. These students know that you can cheat and get away with it. My message was laughable, given their life and academic experiences. They also know their parents are a safety net. Administrators back down on penalties. The honest students can't figure out why they should care when no one else does.
Then there's Marquis Harris, who was denied a teaching job because school officials said he was too smart:
Recently, I interviewed with a school in one of the metro Atlanta counties, only to receive an e-mail from the principal stating, "Though your qualifications are quite impressive, I regret to inform you that we have selected another candidate. It was felt that your demeanor and therefore presence in the classroom would serve as an unrealistic expectation as to what high school students could strive to achieve or become. However, it is highly recommended that you seek employment at the collegiate level; there your intellectual comportment would be greatly appreciated. Good luck."
In other words, the school administrators don't want their students to aim high. We're not going to hold our own against the Indians, the Chinese, and the rest of the world that way.
The educational system is broken. It's been broken for so long that it's easy to tune out stories like this, but in fact, the damage that is being done is significant, and as America's lead over the rest of the world erodes, ignoring that damage is getting far more costly. It's time that the subject gets more attention -- and, even more importantly, action.
There are a lot of educational bloggers who cover these kinds of topics in a lot more depth than I can. Joanne Jacobs (from whose blog these examples come) and Kimberly Swygert are two good examples, and their blogs have links to many more. You should also look at Erin O'Connor's blog, Critical Mass, which does the same thing for higher education.
This stuff matters. America is richer than the rest of the world because we have smart people who work hard, under a system that encourages them to do so by letting them keep (most of) the fruits of their labor. But America's wealth isn't a birthright. Like our freedom, it has to be earned by each successive generation. It can't be protected by legislation, it can only be protected by hard work.
Part of that hard work lies in educating the next generation. It's pretty clear that we're dropping the ball in that department. Instead of worrying about outsourcing, maybe we should be worrying about that.
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