Guest blogger Marc
Tucker is president and CEO of the National
Center on Education and the Economy. In this post, he responds to Mike’s
recent argument that Asian countries looking to find the source of U.S.
innovation should look outside American classrooms. A longer version can be read on the NCEE newsletter website.
Right after the first TIMSS results came out, a couple of us from my organization went to Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong to find out what we could about how they had beaten us so badly. But they were not gloating. With faces full of concern, they said they were not so interested in their success on TIMSS because—and they used exactly the words that Mike quoted—they did not have the Bill Gateses and Steve Jobses they needed to drive their economy. They pumped me relentlessly to find out how we teach innovation in our schools.
We laughed, and told them that we don't. We said that what they were looking at was the product of a society that values the individual much more than the group, whereas Asian cultures typically place much more value on the group than the individual. The saying in Asia is that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
We are a society full of success stories in which young people push their elders aside on the way up.
We celebrate individual achievement. We are a society full of success stories in which young people push their elders aside on the way up. In Asia, young people are taught to ascribe their own success to their bosses and defer to them in all things, knowing the firm will take care of them and their turn will come in time. New ideas are endlessly massaged and vetted by the group before they finally emerge from a process that is essentially consensual. In our society, someone with a new idea is much more likely to leave the firm, get some funding and start a new company, seeking to beat the big firm with his or her disruptive idea.
That is why people like Bill Gates do not thrive in Asia. When I said this to our Asian colleagues, they recoiled. They understood what I was saying, but they deeply fear the social disorder they see in the United States: the high rates of crime in the streets and what they see as rank rudeness and even hooliganism in our schools. They want no part of that and they attribute it to the value we place on the individual over the group.
We went there to learn what we needed to do to match the performance of their students on TIMSS. They could care less.
I laughed as I was travelling back to the United States. We went there to learn what we needed to do to match the performance of their students on TIMSS. They could care less. They wanted to know how they could match our ability to imagine and innovate. But we did not want a society that subordinates the individual to what is good for the group, and they want no part of the hyper-individualism that made it possible to serve as a cauldron of innovation. In this sense, their high test scores have nothing to do with their schooling and our creativity and capacity for innovation has nothing to do with our schooling.
But the reality is not so neat. There are in fact a number of specific features of their education systems that contribute greatly to their superior student performance on international measures of student achievement. We know that because those features are also observed in Western countries that achieve at comparable levels but are obviously not hotbeds of oriental culture. And the Asians, especially the Singaporeans and the cities on the Chinese seaboard are busy making similar observations about the West, sending boatloads of edu-tourists to Finland and Canada to try to understand how they can get more creativity and innovation without abandoning their love of social order and outstanding school performance.
I would sum up by saying that, 20 years ago, Asia and the United States were almost polar opposites on the points Mike raised in his piece. Now the Asians are doing their best to learn from us and are evolving in ways that they hope will enable them to preserve what they most value in their own society, while at the same time borrowing, in a fairly disciplined way, what they think they need from the West in order to enjoy commercial success in a global economy that increasingly rewards creativity and innovation. The United States is not in this game yet. It does not even know the game is being played.
