US building education system to compete with India, China: Obama | Hacker News Reader

US building education system to compete with India, China: Obama

obama.wsj.com

3 pointsnewacc8 comments

The bad news: once upon a time, not so long ago, it would have been unimaginable for a United States President to announce that the United States education system considered India and China its competition.

The good news: once upon a time, even more recently, it would have been unimaginable for a man socially identified as "black" to become President, especially after lengthy childhood residence in Indonesia. So there is a President who understands other countries, and who wants to make sure that the United States steps up to meet world standards in education. As an American who has lived overseas myself, I figure it's good that this issue finally is getting attention.

From the linked Times of India article, the primary source:

"'At the start of my administration I set a goal for America: By 2020, this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. We used to have that. We're going to have it again,' Obama said amidst applause from the audience."

What do all of you think about defining the education goal in these terms? Is having the highest percentage of college graduates really the main issue?

I think defining the educational goal in those terms is rhetorical shorthand for 'employing the most teachers/instructors/professors,' not for 'having the most educated workforce.'

I think defining the educational goal in those terms is rhetorical shorthand for 'employing the most teachers/instructors/professors,'

I'm afraid that may be what is really going on.

I'm not sure this is necessarily bad news. It's a great thing if this means that India and China are producing highly educated, productive people in large numbers. It's a bad thing if India and China haven't improved, and the US is just slipping badly.

That said, we really have to stop holding India and China as a model for education. Yes, they've had some tremendous success, but they absolutely do not produce hundreds of thousands of ultra talented scientists and engineers. Most "stem workers" produced from this system are unemployable as by the standards we have in the US (to be fair, so are many college grads in the US - we just don't record them as "engineers" in our numbers). IIT is a remarkable institution, but it is tiny. I think something like the University of California system - which provides a quality education to hundreds of thousands - is much better approach.

Personally, I'd learn from China and India, sure, but I'd prefer that we set our own standards for excellence as a nation and strive to achieve them.

From the CIA World Factbook, Literacy in the 3 countries:

India 60.1%

China 90.9%

USA 99%

Seems like by that benchmark, India at least, isn't really competition.

The literacy figure for China would be quite doubtful, as well, and definitely based on a more relaxed standard of "literacy" than in the United States. By official Chinese government survey,

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

barely more than half of the population in China is even conversant in the national standard language.

However, all Chinese languages use the same written representation, so any Chinese person speaking a dialect of Chinese that is literate is as literate as a Mandarin-speaker.

This is doubtful as well, because the standard modern written language is based on the vocabulary and grammatical structures of Mandarin. (I am well aware of this, as someone who has lived for years in places where Mandarin is the official language, but the home language of most elementary pupils is a non-Mandarin Sinitic language.) A fairly detailed response to the claim that Chinese characters provide common literacy for people who can't understand one another over the telephone can be found in

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...

http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...

For your convenience, I can link a deep look into one of those books through a focused search on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=fRqKreZFVTYC&pg=PA10...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com