Reading Checker's piece in today's Wall Street Journal sent Terry into a brief fit of arrhythmia and anxiety. One wonders if some amnesia didn't creep in, too.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan told an audience, ?The number of scientists and engineers engaged in research and development in the United States increased by only 25 percent between 1964 and 1979. The increase in France was 90 percent; a 125 percent increase in Germany and 145 percent in Japan.? Japan, he said, with only half the population of the United States, was producing more engineers, and the Soviet Union, he continued, was producing five times more engineering specialists each year than America. Dr. Simon Ramo told the New York Times that year that the United States needed to bolster its technological competitiveness, a process that would start with more and better math and science education?in public schools. ?We've got a disaster impending if we don't change,? Ramo said. Well, we?didn't change. And today everyone in Japan and Germany and France talks on his iPhone, and?Russia?is, well, Russia (that whole Sputnik thing turned out okay). History is pretty clear about this: There was?no ?disaster.?
And there is no disaster, either. Don't trust history? How about a newish, 188-page report from the RAND Corporation, which finds
that the United States continues to lead the world in science and technology and has kept pace or grown faster than other nations on several measurements of S&T performance; that it generally benefits from the influx of foreign S&T students and workers; and that the United States will continue to benefit from the development of new technologies by other nations as long as it maintains the capability to acquire and implement such technologies.
The United States, in 2003, was home to 38 percent of the triadic patents granted in industrialized nations; China and India and Russia were each below?one percent. And America has actually increased its lead in patents since 1980, when it had 34 percent of them to the EU-15's 37 percent. Also,?40 percent of the globe's research and development dollars are spent in the United States, which percentage is higher than that of any other nation and which percentage has grown faster than those of the EU-15?and Japan. Furthermore, as has been written again and again (including in the RAND study), science and math learning is not a zero-sum game; in other words, if China's pupils are becoming more-educated, that is likely to be good for the United States. It is simply simplistic to assume that a strong Chinese technology sector will produce an enervated American one. And, frankly, none of this may have much at all to do with PISA scores!
There are fine and copious reasons to worry about the educations that American public schools provide their students. But those reasons?are not found in China or India. They are found at home.
UPDATE: I just read?the quote?that Checker offered last night on NBC Nightly News:
The rest of the world had better be aware that China in the future is not just going to be producing cheap plastic toys; they are going to be outcompeting us in everything that requires brainpower.
I confess to not understanding the reasoning behind that sentiment.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow