Author: Nicholas D. Kristof
Publication: The New York Times
Date: February 11, 2004
To be permitted to read the rest
of this column, you must first click here and answer the question correctly:
Go on, try it. After all, 83 percent
of Japanese high school seniors got it right (though only 30 percent of
American seniors). The correct answer is (c). If you answered incorrectly,
though, keep reading - think of it as a social promotion.
The topic today is the growing furor
over the outsourcing of jobs to India - and, more broadly, educational
lapses here. One reason for the jobless recovery in the U.S. is that it
doesn't make much sense to have an American radiologist, say, examine your
X-ray when it can be done so much more cheaply in New Delhi.
Indeed, why should computer software
be written, taxes prepared, pathology specimens examined, financial analysis
done or homework graded in the U.S., when all of that can be done more
cheaply in Bangalore? I.B.M. is moving thousands of jobs to India and China,
and Reuters says it will have Indian reporters cover some U.S. companies
from there.
All this is unsettling. But to me
the alarm seems overwrought - and dangerous, for it is likely to fuel calls
for protectionism. A dozen years ago, there was a similar panic about high-tech
jobs going abroad, and people said that Asia would be making computer chips
while Americans produced potato chips.
Instead, free trade worked. Some
autoworkers lost their jobs, but America emerged stronger than ever. Studies
by Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics suggest
that it is the same this time. Outsourcing raises American productivity,
gives our economy a boost, increases foreign demand for U.S. products and
leaves us better off.
Yet, as an Indian friend, Sunil
Subbakrishna, pointed out to me, there is one step we should take in response
to this wave of outsourcing: bolster our second-rate education system.
Mr. Subbakrishna, a management consultant
specializing in technology, notes that in his native Bangalore, children
learn algebra in elementary school. All in all, he says, the average upper-middle-class
child in Bangalore finishes elementary school with a better grounding in
math and science than the average kid in the U.S.
I saw the same thing when I lived
in China and interviewed college applicants there. The SAT wasn't offered
in China, so Chinese high school students took the Graduate Record Examinations
- intended for would-be graduate students - and many still scored in the
99th percentile in math.
The latest international survey,
called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, found that
the best-performing eighth graders were, in order, from Singapore, South
Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Belgium and the Netherlands. The U.S.
ranked 19th, just after Latvia. (India and China weren't surveyed.)
"For too many graduates, the American
high school diploma signifies only a broken promise," declares a major
new study released yesterday by three education policy organizations. Called
the American Diploma Project, it found that 60 percent of employers rated
graduates' skills as only "fair" or "poor."
The broader problem is not just
in schools but society as a whole: There's a tendency in U.S. intellectual
circles to value the humanities but not the sciences. Anyone who doesn't
nod sagely at the mention of Plato's cave is dismissed as barely civilized,
while it's no blemish to be ignorant of statistics, probability and genetics.
If we're going to revere Plato, as we should, we should also remember that
his academy supposedly had a sign at the entrance: "Let no one ignorant
of geometry enter here."
In 1957, the Soviet launching of
Sputnik frightened America into substantially improving math and science
education. I'm hoping that the loss of jobs in medicine and computers to
India and elsewhere will again jolt us into bolstering our own teaching
of math and science.
