Students in Asian countries—China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan—score higher than their US peers in reading, math, and science. CNN, whose writers apparently fell off the proverbial donkey cart yesterday, describes this as “a troubling trend.”
This is, however, a trend that goes back at least two generations. In the early to mid-1980s, when I was a high school student, there was a panic about US students falling behind. (At that time, we were probably more concerned with US student rankings vis-à-vis West Germans and Finns.)
On January 28, 1986, teacher Christa McAuliffe died along with the NASA crew when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean.
Why was a teacher aboard the space shuttle? The Reagan administration, alarmed over falling US scholastic rankings, hoped that the presence of a teacher aboard the space shuttle would increase US students’ interest in science and math.
Despite the presence of so many world-class universities within our borders, America has never been a scholarly, literary, or test-acing nation. Well into the nineteenth century, the most popular English-language writers in the United States were British writers like Charles Dickens.
In more recent decades, there are worries that Asian students are too far ahead of our kids in math and science. These fears have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. In the past, we could steal the best and brightest from Taiwan, South Korea, China, and India. That may become more difficult in the near future.
Why are we such second-rate students? Historically, America was a frontier nation that was stubbornly obsessed with the practical. During the Industrial Revolution, education was tolerated if not necessarily prized. Could an education help you build a better steel mill? That was the relevant question.
The modern era, with its industrial-model grade schools and high schools, has shaped our indifference toward education in a different way. In recent decades, the obsession with competitive games and other extracurricular activities in school environments has far eclipsed the interest in competitive GPA rankings. At least, this was the way it was when I was a suburban high school student in the 1980s.
(The American obsession with watching grown men play boys’ games continues well into adulthood for most of us. This week I have heard little on the news but chatter about the start of the NFL season.)
One of my coworkers from Taiwan, a man I worked with in the late 1990s, was particularly baffled by this. He told me that in Taiwan, sports are seen as little more than something you do to blow off steam and keep your body limber when you’re not studying for the next exam.
All of these criticisms of American priorities are fair game and worth noting. I have noticed them for years and I haven’t been the only one.
But the proof is still in the pudding. The U.S. is still the top economy in the world, the country that draws the most immigrants. People aren’t flooding into Taiwan and China from other countries, despite these nations’ superior math scores.
All of this means that we’re doing something right, and we have been doing something right for decades now, even if we could genuinely use some improvement in our scholarship.
Imagine if we could raise our test scores to the top international levels and maintain the dynamism and competitive spirit that has always distinguished America from its Old World and Asian counterparts. Now that would really be something.
-ET