NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has a long article entitled “It?s a Flat World, After All in this past Sunday?s Magazine. It covers stuff we all probably know at least vaguely but haven’t really internalized.
To this father of two teen-agers, one jarring passage was toward the end, when Friedman talked about what?s likely in store for our children in the global economic competition being spawned by the Internet explosion.
… [B]y connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South.
Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally.
Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.
When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.
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.. Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, ”The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.” …
These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors’ conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ”obsolete.” As Gates put it: ”When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they’re in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers.
In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.”
- In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did.
- China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering.
We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living.
When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ”Tom, finish your dinner — people in China are starving.” But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ”Girls, finish your homework — people in China and India are starving for your jobs.”
(Emphasis, bullets, and extra paragraphing added.)
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