If the World Is Flat
If the World Is Flat - Review by Michael J. Petrilli - Education Next - Winter 2006
“The sense of entitlement, the sense that because we once dominated global commerce and geopolitics … we always will, the sense that delayed gratification is a punishment worse than a spanking, the sense that our kids have to be swaddled in cotton wool so that nothing bad or disappointing or stressful ever happens to them at school is, quite simply, a growing cancer on American society. And if we don’t start to reverse it, our kids are going to be in for a huge and socially disruptive shock.”
These are words by Friedman. Petrilli, however, thinks the book fails to deliver a solution to the education failure in the US.
Surely, I thought, he is going to argue that real competition, in the form of charters or maybe even vouchers, would have the same positive, transformative effects on our education system that the liberalization of India’s economy has had on its development. Without a doubt, I thought, he will compare our schools’ stultifying unions to those of Europe, whose labor markets he derides as “inflexible, rigidly regulated … full of government restrictions on hiring and firing.” Definitely, he will call for a more rigorous focus on the basics; after all, he quotes Bill Gates as saying, “I have never met the guy who doesn’t know how to multiply who created software.… You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them.” Unquestionably, Friedman will ridicule the whiners who complain that No Child Left Behind is leading to too much homework and too little summer vacation for poor little Susie, while other nations leap ahead. Without a doubt, I was convinced, he will look at this new flat world, where Americans must compete with people not from their own community or state but from all over the planet, and declare our patchwork education system—with its 50 sets of academic standards and tests—no longer up to the challenges at hand and say that the time has come for rigorous national standards and tests, political obstacles be damned.
Alas, my inner school reformer was sorely disappointed.
I, on the other hand, thank Friedman for the underwhelming, non-radical ideas. You really have to appreciate the remarkably flat curves in the NAEP scores from the 1970s to today — children and teachers are rescilient (or resistent, depending on who you talk to) to top-down policy changes over the past decades. What positive changes have these kinds of educational reforms bring since compulsory education began?
Globelization puts a lot of pressure on Corporate America, but that doesn’t mean they can easily steer the dynamics of the US education system to produce qualified workers. While the NCLB may have some leverage on schools and teachers, it is foolish to think that would translate directly into student learning when students themselves (and their families) are not held accountable. I think I hear what Petrilli was awaiting.
Think about what that might mean — I know no better way other than to introduce fierce competetion over limited resources (e.g., limited college opportunities) and to accept a portion of the children as failures, without which accountability means nothing. And undoubtedly in this situation the success and failure of a child is linked to social class, family resources, and all sorts of inequalities that the American education system was set to level. Having survived the Chinese education system, I know that model brings the best and the worst of a child at the same time. Is this the kind of price America is ready to pay?