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Schooling programs are necessarily designed to serve the needs of the economy. The modern American school system's development was greatly facilitiated by the great 19th century capitalists such as Carnegie, Astor, Morgan and Rockefeller. In addition to training docile, but capable, factory and office workers, they also pushed truly wierd ideas like bionomics as the basis for the creation of an over-class to deal with the modern scientific world's complexities and override the clumsy notions of 18th democracy. To a large extent they succeeded. The problem is that America now suffers from both the obviation of paticipatory democracy (which required good generalist literacy) and a decline in the demand for skilled office and factory workers.
Ironically, this piece starts off with whining from Bill Gates, the country's richest man and a college drop-out, and finishs with ignorant young people struggling with the limits of their eternalized childhood fog and Newspeak glosses (Jay Leno has been doing a similar segment for years). Let's be honest: America's corporate elites have found it expedient to wiggle out of their social contract with Americans and make new deals elsewhere. At least Bill got richer last year; most high-school graduates didn't.
The Chinese girls seemed best at US-president-naming, which also comes as little surprise. A study this month from IBM's Institute for Business Value and Fudan University in Shanghai suggests that lack of educated staff is one of the main hurdles to Chinese corporate dominance in international markets. Thus, education is a top priority in China these days. The Chinese have been sending out teachers and school officials worldwide to study the best practices of the world's top public school systems. Here in Finland, we had Chinese teachers observing in our kids classes for several weeks. Finnish 15-year-olds, it seems, do very well in math, history, geography and novel problem-solving, and the Chinese are interested in incorporating Finnish approaches in their teaching. Haven't seen any Chinese teachers sitting in your kids classes lately? Now that's something for Oprah to really worry about.
