Focus on global education

We All Have A Lot to Learn

We All Have A Lot to Learn
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, January 9, 2006

"Traveling around Asia for most of the past month, I have been struck by the relentless focus on education. It makes sense. Many of these countries have no natural resources, other than their people; making them smarter is the only path for development. China, as always, appears to be moving fastest. When officials\ there talk about their plans for future growth, they point out that they have increased spending on colleges and universities almost tenfold in the past 10 years.
Yale's president, Richard Levin, notes that\ Peking University's two state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication lines�each employing a different technology�outshine anything in the United States. East Asian countries top virtually every global ranking of students in science and mathematics.
But one thing puzzles me about these oft-made comparisons. I talked to Tharman Shanmugaratnam to understand it better. He's the minister of Education of Singapore, the country that is No. 1 in the global science and math rankings for schoolchildren. I asked the minister how to explain the fact that even though Singapore's students do so brilliantly on these tests, when you look at these same students 10 or 20 years later, few of them are worldbeaters anymore. Singapore has few truly top-ranked scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives or academics. American kids, by contrast, test much worse in the fourth and eighth grades but seem to do better later in life and in the real world. Why? 'We both have meritocracies,' Shanmugaratnam said. 'Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well - like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."

Shanmugaratnam also pointed out that American universities are unrivaled globally—and are getting better.

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