Build Resilience Not Dependence

I had lunch this past week with two civic leaders in their handsome small city in central Illinois. Both had moved to their present town for family reasons, after careers in other states. They are both concerned about the averageness of their local high school.

One is a successful, retired school man, from a Florida district that has sent more graduates to US service academies than maybe any other school in the nation. He recently made a proposal to the local high school that I figured couldn’t be refused.

The educator offered to fund the creation of an International Baccalaureate Curriculum (IBC) at the high school. This really rigorous program for talented high schoolers puts them on a path to success in our best universities.

“Nah,” said the school board and superintendent about the offer. “We’re doin’ just fine.”

But our average Downstate high schools aren’t doin’ just fine. If you took Chicago kids’ scores out of the state averages, most Downstate schools would be below average, some significantly so.

We have to step up our game, or we will lose the hot “Cold War” competition we are in with China for technological and economic primacy. Nothing wrong with competition, especially when you win it.

Yet, I fear most Americans are blithely unaware of what is going on. If they were, I would hope they would get about shaping up our nation, which has lost its edge.

As I reported in an earlier column, I still recall my first day in Shanghai, now 15 years ago, for one of three teaching stints at a prominent university in that city of 25-30 million. I was stretching my legs on that Saturday morning, after the grueling flight, outside my “foreign expert” guest quarters.

I noted several clutches of darling youngsters, in uniforms, heading down the neighborhood street toward what looked like a school building. Later, I asked my host professor what I was seeing. “Oh, they were going to school. We have school every Saturday until noon (and one hour more of instruction each weekday than in the US).”

I’ll bet that if the parents of those kids were told their kids couldn’t go to school on Saturdays, there would be riots in the streets. I fear that, if parents here were told their children had to go to school on Saturdays, there would also be riots in the streets.

We have to look beyond our understandable preoccupation with the pandemic and political turmoil, to the larger, even more important challenge of intensifying a commitment to education at all levels, and to firming up the growing, soft underbelly of low-achieving American society.

Otherwise, we will wake up one day in 15 years, or sooner, and find that we are dependent on China for rare earth metals, high tech products and the software to run our world.

America and European nations, plus Japan, colonized and humiliated China and much of Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The proud Chinese haven’t forgotten. Over thousands of years of history, a century ago to them is but yesterday. The Chinese are not evil in wanting to once again become the “Central Empire” of the world, any more than the West was when it tried to take over the world in the past couple of centuries. It’s called competition, and it’s brutal right now.

With four times as many people as in the US, they may have more honor students than we have students, and their people are “clever” (their English word for smart), but they aren’t necessarily world beaters. The Chinese are experiencing ever more oppressive state control, which appears to be stifling some innovation. So, their best and brightest may well want to create and innovate in the West.

And their earlier one-child program is leaving China with a high and growing ratio of elderly-to-producer population.

The US has to become more strategic in how it spends its limited money (we can’t print it forever, as we seem to be doing, without dire consequences for our grandkids).

For example, most Americans can do without the additional $1,400 in pandemic largesse that will apparently be splashed onto us soon. That kind of money should instead go toward our research laboratories and into more IBC and AP (Advance Placement) programs in our high schools. Our students can handle the challenge of rigorous education.

The kids need to be challenged. Just as all of us need to step up our competitiveness game.