Collegiate Times

The statistics are well known. The United States is lagging behind the international competition in every category — reading, science and math. Out of the 34 countries that were part of the study, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math.  That is abysmal, especially since less than three decades ago, the U.S. was at the forefront of educational rankings and considered a country to be emulated.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press, “This is an absolute wake-up call for America,” and, “We have to get much more serious about investing in education.”  Duncan is right — those statistics should be a resounding wake-up call, but money alone is not the remedy.

Do you know why the Chinese surpassed the U.S. in the educational rankings? As the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development Secretary General Angel Gurria cites, it is their emphasis on the importance of education and a curriculum that is relevant to everyday life. How did the Chinese accomplish this? Well it wasn’t because of money since the GDP per capita for Shanghai — where the sample was taken — was well below the OECD average, which accentuates the notion that a low-income area does not necessarily correlate to poor educational performance. 

The irony is that the U.S. does reign supreme in one area — dollars spent per student.  Currently the U.S. ranks second in spending per student — right behind Luxembourg, while countries like Estonia and Poland spend half of what the U.S. does and still gets the same educational output. Colloquially, that means the U.S. has a terrible investment return and needs to take a couple finance classes to figure out how to maximize this. 

Furthermore, what is truly disturbing is people understand what a solid educational system can do for a country’s economy. For example, if the U.S. boosted its scores on the international evaluation by an average of 25 points over the next 20 years, it is estimated that there would be a gain of $41 trillion in the U.S economy over the lifetime of the generation born in 2010, according to Stanford University and the OECD. This concept also applies to the micro level — for every dollar Virginia invests in higher education, it spurs $13.31 in economic output and $1.39 in tax revenue. 

So how can the U.S. become more competitive while simultaneously reducing cost per student? This is the fundamental question since the U.S. is not in a position to significantly raise its educational investment when it has other pertinent priorities at hand (i.e. managing a deficit of $16 trillion, three overseas conflicts/wars, dubious job market, precarious economy).

What the U.S. educational system should do is take a hard look in the mirror — it needs to realize that the traditional, assembly-line style education children are receiving is pernicious to the economy, stifling intellectual creativity and needs to be modified. 

Sir Ken Robinson, a world-renowned education and creativity expert, gave a lecture titled “Changing Education Paradigms” where he delineated the history of our educational system and expounded why it is not applicable to the 21st century. 

Robinson elucidated, “The current system of education was designed, conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution.” 

To clarify, our educational system was constructed by the intellectual elite of the enlightenment, during a time when there was an economic imperative for skilled labor.  Additionally, when this system originated, a naive conception of intelligence was formulated — one that focuses only on academic ability — and thus has created a false dichotomy of academic and non-academic people when measuring intelligence. It is because of this false notion of intelligence that many children feel segregated from a school’s primary intent — to learn. 

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A version of this article appeared in the Sep 21 issue of the Collegiate Times.