Quotes: Obama Challenges Kids To Keep Up With Other Nations

They're not hangin' out. They're not gettin' over. They're not playin' video games. They're not watching 'Real Housewives.' --  President Obama at the Urban League, via Politico

Comments

[Bruce]

Man did I see this in the seven years I spent in Seoul, Korea in the 1990s. I came back to America on visits and heard accounts of my suburban nieces cutting classes at school and transfixed by softball. Now, fifteen years later, those Korean students of mine who studied so hard are doctors, while my American relatives, having failed to earn remunerative degrees on their initial attempts, are celebrating new opportunities in nursing, where they will have the opportunity to serve those who studied harder earlier. I take this as a metaphor for transformations in international relations in the 21st century. The president gets it; but most Americans, lacking international experience and awareness, don't, and are waking up too late to their reduced job prospects, the first generation in American history to achieve less than their parents.

[Sarah]

But are they becoming visionaries, or merely the epicenter of industrialization efforts? Test scores are one thing, but you cannot measure human achievement with a number. I don’t mean to suggest that either system of education, American or Asian, is more effective, but rather that I think we are both getting things wrong. We let children be children to a fault. Asia builds excellent mathematicians and scientists, but puts a borderline-fanatical emphasis on success, to the point of depression and shame amongst a family as the result of a test score. There has to be a happy medium. As much as I am as left-wing as thinkers come, Newt Gingrich put one point excellently: we are a nation of dreamers. The problem is that visionaries, those who once drove our economy with innovations, are no longer being raised. They’re either distracted or taught through the factory line we call education, held to standards when every human is different.

[Bruce]

Competition for resources, including employment, isn't new. Employers are interested in standards because they have a legitimate interest in trying to fairly compare applicants. Fortunately, we have the most varied, complex economy in the world, with plenty of places potentially available for a vast variety of human talents. My experience does not verify either your assertion, Sarah, that "factory line" education crushes dreams (these students I wrote about absolutely had dreams -- to live like you do) or limits innovation; half of the new patents coming out of Silicon Valley are being filed by people who experienced "factory line" education (not a particularly fitting metaphor, actually). Newt's right, in this case, as is President Obama: we need dreamers, and benefit by them, but it's best if those dreams are somehow attached to the real world our young people are moving into, rather than the world of fantasy entertainment.