RDH - U.S. Education, Misled by Easy Path to International Hegemony, Mistakenly Assumes That Its Students Should Lead the World in Reading, Math, and Science

U.S. Education, Misled by Easy Path to International Hegemony, Mistakenly Assumes That Its Students Should Lead the World in Reading, Math, and Science

March 3, 2007

There's no question about it: the United States has been a powerful force in the last century or century and a half. All roads seem to have led to this being so. A vast, once-empty, pleasantly temperate land mass has been the very ground, over the past three centuries or so, upon which the best ideas from Europe, Asia, Africa—you name it—have been given the space to develop and bear fruit, thanks to the gracious stepping aside of the native population and the liberal economic policies that were necessary to allow the continent to fill up with an industrializing population. (A single categorically illiberal policy—namely, slave labor—stood in the way of a mature industrial economy, which, by the 1850s, was imminent. The economic mandates of the new system would have wiped out the practice of slavery with or without a war.)

The ideas for almost all that has characterized the United States since at least the Civil War—from economic opportunity and a notion of civil liberties to assembly lines and railroads to automobiles to electricity to atomic power to the personal computer and the Internet—came from somewhere else. Europeans, helped by their immediate antecedents in such regions as the Mediterranean and North Africa, laid much of the groundwork for such novelties as the atomic bomb and the American notion of human rights; naturally, North America was used as a testing and proving grounds, a place where these concepts could become viable commodities. And if the assembly line or the warehouses of Amazon.com—or the Dewey decimal system of classification, for that matter—appeared to have originated almost wholly within the United States, each of these systems was developed by people who could trace the intellectual basis of their innovations to somewhere other than North America. These innovators were like people who, steeped in the traditions of a lavish ancestral home, find themselves in possession of an unfurnished but marvelous new mansion—and an unlimited budget to furnish it as they please.

To put it a third way, the United States, by giving people from different backgrounds the space to exchange ideas and carry out vast industrial and technological programs with unlimited elbow room for testing and reconfiguring—a place in which to build modern plants and cities and canal and rail and highway and air and telecommunication systems, and to organize the corporations that build them and use them from the ground up, without, for the most part, being obliged to tiptoe around ancient gothic cathedrals and narrow streets from the age before the automobile—is the realization of many ideas but the origin of practically none.*

Now that that's out of the way—and back on the subject of public education in the United States—let's consider that, if none of the things that "made America great" came from America, why is everybody certain that American students should be outperforming students in the rest of the world?

The Fallacy of the Bright Student in the Information Age

Bright parents invariably did well in school. We should be proud of ourselves. We can read and write like demons, and many of us are good at math. We all take advantage of the information available at our fingertips, giving us the illusion that we are even smarter than our parents and grandparents. Naturally, we want our children to have, at the very least, the same advantages. Moreover, we would be thrilled if our children could grow up to build on the exciting technological advances that we ourselves have witnessed or contributed to—things like satellite radio and video on demand. We want our children, in a word, to be brilliant and wealthy.

So whenever the news breaks that test scores are down, we worry once again that the United States is going down the tubes.

Fortunately, this isn't so, as we have seen. If the United States is not responsible for its own spectacular hegemony, then the kids who are scoring badly aren't the ones who matter to our future. And it's obvious that the majority of the students being tested aren't the smart ones. Why worry about them? We'll always need to fill jobs in the service sectors, and the day when we live in a matrix rather than in real homes constructed out of real materials is too far off to even matter. Put another way, we'll need more than just a bunch of math and science geeks or word mavens to keep our country going strong. For you and your brilliant child, there's absolutely nothing to worry about.

The “American” University

So your brilliant kid is intelligent even if the rest of the country's students are not, but it gets better. Your kid is going to college, and American universities, founded on the nineteenth-century German model, are the very finest in the world. Being engines of corporate growth, they're the best-funded institutions in the history of humanity. Because if there's one thing that does come from the United States, it's money. Our universities are so good, in fact, that they are contributing to what may be the final stage of human evolution: the semiautistic superhuman, capable of surviving entirely in the realm of the abstract space created by the architects of the so-called age of information. And the rest of the world, as always, stands ready to help us to bring our new dreams to fruition.

So the next time you hear a politician bemoan how America's students will not be ready for the information age, remember that he or she survives by trumpeting false notions about American superiority.

A Final Note on Testing

Tests at the primary and secondary school levels should be offered only to those students who want to take them. As for the curriculum, it should be changed according to how many students opt to take tests. If few end up volunteering to be tested, this should be seen as a green light for a more interesting and fun curriculum that focuses on physical education and hands-on activities such as art and which largely relegates the teaching of skills such as math and reading to the home, where smart kids will always get what they need. At school, those same smart kids can be taught about plumbing and petroleum refining and other things that they will need to understand in order to fully appreciate the physical aspects of their world, even as they move deeper and deeper into a future of brilliant abstraction.

*A notable exception is microwave popcorn, a chiefly American innovation.