After Opening Olympic Weekend Americans Ranked 25th (in Education)
The Olympics began on Friday with an opening flourish that few will soon forget. Thousands of individual performers, turning in nothing less than perfection. Unbelievable technical achievements, including the world’s largest LED screen. In one of the acts, two-thousand and eight drummers counted down to the official opening of the games. It was summed up rather well by NBC commentator, Matt Lauer, who said it was, "Awe-inspiring and perhaps intimidating."
Well, if you are just now getting intimidated by the talents of the Chinese, you simply are not paying attention, which unfortunately seems to be a large part of the problem.
As of today, we are currently ranked first in the medal count, with China lurking just one medal behind. However, if we were to swap our athletic standing with our academic standing, we would currently be between Azerbaijan and Slovakia, ranked somewhere around 25th in the world according to the most recent international testing benchmarks. (By the way, both of those nations scored higher than the U.S. on the latest mathematics PISA tests.)
Doubtlessly, if we ranked 25th in medals, we would have woken up this morning to fervent debate, endless handwringing, and zealously-heeded calls to action. To wit, when our Olympic basketball team won the bronze in 2004, getting back to the top was the subject of a national debate that was as vast as it was hyperbolic.
However, upon learning about where we stood academically with the rest of the world, Americans across the country shrugged silently and moved on with their lives, if they ever heard the news at all. There was little hand-wringing, less debate, and the calls to action have thus far gone largely unheeded. Unlike with our basketball team, there was almost no discussion as to how we could find ourselves back on top, and our educational decline was far more precipitous.
China and India do not participate in the PISA international education assessment, but is there any doubt that they too would rank higher than the United States at this point? Where is the academic version of our so-called basketball "Redeem Team"? Do we, as a nation, really want to hold company with the Azerbaijans and Slovakias of the world, or do we not still pride ourselves with being world leaders?
If we do, we must begin to take our education as seriously as we do our athletics. Because if you think you’re intimidated by the Chinese now, just wait until they have talent pool of a half-billion highly educated people. Within our lifetimes, they could feasibly have more engineers and researchers than we do people.
But at least we routed them in basketball, right?
//updated 9:59am, added link to study.
Comments