March 25, 2007
Our Children Left Behind: Our Future Left Behind

Susan Frederick-Gray

Several weeks ago I preached a sermon about Harvard Moral Philosophy, a school of thought that began among Unitarians at Harvard in the 1830's. This school of thought advocated for universal education for all children. The purpose of that education would be foremost to awaken in children a passion for learning. William Ellery Channing said at that time that “education should ‘inspire a profound love of truth' and ‘teach the process of investigation.'” And James Walker, the President of Harvard in the 1850's said, “It is not among the proper or legitimate objects of education, either in religion or anything else, to inculcate an implicit or blind faith, to enslave the soul to a fixed creed, or to dictate what the mind shall think, feel or believe.” Walker “claimed not to shape his students, so much as to help them grow , for ‘education..does not consist in putting things into the mind, but, in bringing things out. '

That period in American history and world history was a time of tremendous change. Movements for democracy spread across Europe. And here in this country, Unitarians saw how education could and should support and strengthen democracy by providing the foundation for strong moral character, inspired innovators and educated leaders. You see, at the foundation of both democracy and this understanding of education is a fundamental optimism about humanity--a celebration of human reason, ability and intelligence. In this climate, Unitarians saw universal education as the key to unlocking human potential, ingenuity and moral development--qualities that would strengthen a nation founded on freedom, self-government and democracy.

The opportunities that both this young nation and democracy created for the individual were innumerable. Democracy and capitalism afforded the chance for individuals and corporations to rise up through a system of meritocracy and create enormous wealth. However I must be clear that these opportunities were not available to everyone. The success of our nation was indeed born off the hard labor of many who were not free, and the resources of this New World were ill-begotten, the spoils of the near genocide of the peoples who lived on this land before Christopher Columbus arrived.

Today unfolding all around us is another great era of change, and another great opportunity for individual ingenuity and creativity. And while the United States has done much to create this new era--we are not alone in enjoying its benefits or needing to adapt ourselves to its changes.

Welcome to what reporter Thomas Friedman calls Globalization 3.0 in his book The World is Flat: A brief history of the 21st century . According to Friedman, Globalization 1.0 began when Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492, opening trade between the Old World and the New World. This shrank the world from large to medium size. This era was about muscle and brawn and “how much horsepower, wind power and later steam power one could harness” to compete for trade and opportunity. The question that dominated Globalization 1.0 was “Where does my country fit into global competition and opportunities? How can I go global and collaborate with others through my country.” In globalization 1.0 walls between countries and distant lands fell. It was the time of imperialism and colonialism.

Around 1800, version 1.0 gave way to Globalization 2.0, where the world shrank from medium to small. This period of globalization was driven by multinational corporations. Globalization 2.0 lasted until the year 2000. In this time it was multinational corporations that drove the forces that made the world smaller. They went global for labor and markets. The Industrial Revolution spearhead the pace of change. This era was fueled by falling transportation costs with the invention of the steam engine and by improved communication with the telegraph, telephones, personal computers, satellites, fiber optic cables and the first version of the World Wide Web. In this era we saw the birth of the global economy. The question that dominated Globalization 2.0 was “Where does my company fit into the global economy? How does it take advantage of the opportunities? How do I go global and collaborate with others through my company?”

Friedman uses the phrase “while I was sleeping” to talk about when Globalization 2.0 suddenly gave way to Globalization 3.0. He argues it happened right before our very eyes while those of us in the U.S. have been sidetracked and singularly focused on terrorism. The events of 9/11 sidetracked us--but these events did not impede the speed of change. Globalization 3.0 shrunk the world from small to tiny, and in the meantime is flattening the global playing field. The world is flat, the title of Friedman's book, refers to both the shrinking of the world and the leveling of the playing field.

What is different about Globalization 3.0 is the tremendous power that individuals have to collaborate and compete globally. Companies too have been empowered in this era, but what happened in 2000, according to Friedman, is that people all over the world “started waking up and realizing they have more power than ever before to go global as individuals , and they needed more than ever to think of themselves as individuals competing against other individuals all over the planet, and more opportunities than ever to work with those individuals, not just compete with them.”

Here are just a few examples of the flattening world. We all know about the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and customer service and IT support call centers. But did you know that tutoring is now being outsourced? American and European parents contract with firms in India to tutor their children. Using the internet and instant messaging and other immediate forms of communication, a student and a tutor work together on worksheets on the computer--each of them looking at the same worksheet and reviewing it, discussing it asking questions using instant messaging. Another company in India designs curriculum and lesson plans for teachers in Europe and America. Even McDonald's is using outsourcing to take orders at the drive through. At several McDonald's restaurants across the country when you pull up to the drive through to give your order it may be someone in India who is taking it and sending it back to the employees working in the back.

Because technology allows people to communicate, share information and collaborate on projects nearly instantaneously from anywhere in the world, jobs that are no longer location specific can go anywhere on the globe. This flattens the playing field by allowing India, China, Mexico, Tawian, Eastern Europe--people anywhere and everywhere to compete for good jobs and access to wealth and opportunity.

And increasingly it is not just low-paid or low skilled jobs that are being outsourced. Essentially anything and everything that is not location specific is going to places where it is cheaper and more efficient to get it done. This means more middle class jobs are being and will continue to be outsourced. For example, financial and accounting firms now outsource tax return preparations to India and China. The internationally known Reuters news service has a 300 employee operation in Bangalore, India having outsourced some basic numbers crunching work to India that reporters used to do. Now software design, programming and marketing jobs are also going to India.

Therefore the dominant question today is “Where do I as an individual fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally?”

This is a question that as a nation we have not begun to take seriously. As the teacher that wrote the letter to Friedman suggests, “we are complacent and heading for trouble.” Now, of course, there are many top notch scientists, engineers and creative innovators graduating from US universities (although we are find that many of them are foreign students, and with the opportunities opening up in their own countries, many will not need to stay in the US to be a part of the global economy. They are increasingly returning home to start businesses, head up scientific research labs and inspire more competitve business and education in their home countries.). However, overall our nation is not funding or encouraging education that will prepare our children to compete in the flat world. And when we compare testing of our kids against kids from other countries our proficiency rates in math and science, but also in English and reading comprehension are falling. And, they are not just falling when compared to other countries, they are in some cases stagnating when compared to our own scores just 10 years ago. Testing done in 2004 showed American fifteen year olds performing below the international average when it came to applying math skills to real life situations.

Some of the biggest problems that Friedman identifies in our education system is first off, our funding system, which puts funding and control of schools in local communities. This creates enormous disparity between schools. Suburban areas create their own schools and with relatively low taxes (because of the high property values and larger pieces of property) can provide excellent funds for their schools, while cities with lower property values have to rely on high taxes just to fund the basics of their school. Additionally with local control--and I know this is a controversial issue--you have schools in Kansas or Pennsylvania or wherever choosing to take basic science out of their scientific curriculum and replace it with lessons of faith and belief. Essentially, we have no uniform (even at the most basic level) standard of education.

The second critical problem is the huge gap just about to hit in math, science and engineering. For a generation we have failed to inspire in our children an interest in science. Because of this we do not have the young adults prepared to replace the scientists and engineers of the baby boomer generation. And those of you in those fields may find many incentives offered to you to keep you working because of this gap. There are many reasons for this this but most stark is our continued cuts in funding to science and engineering education. Even when we do increase the federal budgets for this part of education, it is never enough to rise above inflation--so in effect we continue to cut it. Meanwhile countries in the developing world are doubling their budgets for science and engineering education.

In the past these problems were not problems at all. While they were certainly justice issues, the inequity in school funding served the needs of a manufacturing based economy where a large adequately educated work force was needed to fill the jobs available, while a smaller, wealthier group was educated to be the innovators of society. In the flat world this system fails our students and our nation by preparing them for jobs that are no longer here in the states. This was echoed at the ACTION Public Meeting last fall when one student said plainly--we get out of high school and if we can't or don't go to college--there is nothing for us to do, no jobs, no opportunities.

I cannot overstate this--we are in a time of tremendous economic change. Jobs that were once here are no longer--and will no longer be. Lower and now middle income jobs are moving overseas, and we can not stop this. And doing so in the long run is neither viable nor profitable. The key to America's future is educating ourselves and our young people for the new middle--for the skills and attitudes they will need to compete and excel in the flat world.

Creating universal standards of education as the No Child Left Behind Act began to do is a positive thing. Failing to fund it and continuing to rely on an outmoded and inequitable funding system like ours that relies on local funding of schools through property taxes is not. It is undercutting our children and our future.

“Teaching to the test” is one of the big criticisms of No Child Left Behind. For sure, rote memorization should not be the approach of our schools. However, teaching the fundamentals of each area of learning is crucial. Available at every child's finger tips with a computer and broadband connection is knowledge about almost any subject. Kids can learn and study almost anything online--but it is learning the fundamentals that will allow kids to understand, analyze, be critical about and integrate the vast amount of information available to them. Our schools and teachers need to teach kids how to learn, how to evaluate, how to think critically, understand and integrate what they read.

In this time where things are changing quickly and information is readily accessible to everyone two things will become incredibly important--passion and curiosity. Friedman argues that these are more important than even intelligence. Helping inspire a love of a learning and encouraging young people to follow their curiosity and their dreams will be a basic ingredient of creating success because in a flat world all the tools to educate yourself are right in front of you--what each person needs now is the desire. And as all of us have probably learned at some point in our lives--that drive and desire only comes from doing things we love.

The really good news about this flat world is that the jobs that can be created here in the US if we prepare ourselves and our children will be good jobs--they will be jobs that require people who are creative, who can have a broad focus and see similarities, even integrate different subjects like math and music, art and computers, and it will create good jobs for people with good people skills, who collaborate well and have good interpersonal and social skills.

One of the perceptions of the rise of technology and the internet is that it draws us inward away from our neighbors and community. We are all inside watching the same TV show, rather than visiting on our front porches. However the future may hold something quite different. As things become increasing automated people skills will become even more valuable--people who can synthesize, integrate, adapt and transcend as well as think creatively will be in demand. Because so many new middle jobs will require a kind of personal touch this may actually produce a revival in interactive people skills, which certainly have atrophied with the internet. One economist even argues this “may lead to just the opposite of the phenomena that Charlie Chaplin parodied so effectively in Modern Times . Human beings are social animals who enjoy human contact. In many past decades, it looked as if modern economic life were conspiring to minimize the volume of natural human contact that takes place on the job. In future decades, as personal services come to be more predominant, that trend seems likely to reverse--possibly leading to less alienation and greater average job satisfaction.” (p. 293).

And so I want to end by taking us all the way back to where I began. Those early Unitarians who advocated for high quality universal education for all children that would prepare them and our nation for the opportunities of those days. We never quite achieved their goal of creating that type of education--but it is really the same principles that must drive education today. We need to inspirie in our children a love of learning (Channing called it a love of truth). We need to be teaching our kids how to learn--so they can use the information available to them to be life long learners and adapters as knowledge and technology grow and change everyday. Channing called it to the need to teach “the process of investigation.”

And we need to change our half hearted approach to science, math and engineering education in this country and begin investing and inspiring our young people, our girls and boys, to pursue these fields. It is possible that the rise of fundamentalism and the push to replace science with religion in the classroom, even the rise of religious-based home schooling is a reaction to the very real fear and tension that arises during these times of tremendous change. But like James Walker so eloquently put “It is not among the proper or legitimate objects of education, either in religion or anything else, to inculcate an implicit or blind faith, to bind down and enslave the soul to a fixed creed, or to dictate, either directly or indirectly, what the mind shall think, feel or believe.” We would do well to look to these high standard of education today to help our children maneuver this changing world and to ensure them and all of us a place on the cutting edge of this future.

1 All quotations in paragraph from Daniel Walker Howe. The Unitarian Conscience . Wesleyan University Press, 1988 p.257-258.
2 Friedman, Thomas L . The World is Flat: A brief history of the Twenty-first Century . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, updated and expanded version, 2006, p. 9.
3 Ibid ., p. 9-10.
4 Ibid ., p. 11.
5 Ibid ., p. 40-49, various examples.
6 Ibid ., p. 11.
7 Ibid ., p. 336.
8 Ibid ., p.337.
9 Ibid ., p. 348-349.
10 Ibid ., p.346