A Life-changing Trip to India
On my first trip to India several years ago, I never imagined how visiting a classroom of first graders in Bangalore would change my life forever. But that is exactly what happened on my very first trip through exotic, engaging, emerging India in 2005.
The ambitions of these young students astonished me. When I asked a dozen 5 and 6-year old Indian children “What do you want to be when you grow up?” their answers were “Engineer, engineer, scientist, cardiologist, engineer, fighter pilot, engineer, doctor…” How amazing! Those first graders had already set high intellectual and career goals. Perhaps this class was an aberration, a coterie of little Indian geniuses, or perhaps there was something more profound in Indian education and Indian culture than I ever imagined.
I started researching education in other Asian countries as well, and what I found completely blew me away. These students spend less time on sports and more time in school – as much as 100% more in the case of China. They spend less time socializing and more time in tutoring. They don’t hold part time jobs, because they see intellectual pursuits as a full-time requirement.
Most troubling of all, this educational superiority is occurring in countries where the K-12 student population dwarfs our own: India has 211 million K-12 students; China has 200 million as compared to America’s 53 million.
So in the decades ahead Americans will still be competing economically with our historic competitors – the Japanese, who crushed the U.S. auto industry, the Koreans, Singaporeans, Taiwanese who captured electronics and steel and the Europeans who remain potent competitors. Now every American child will also be competing with four Indian children and four Chinese children – children who are getting a better education, are more highly motivated and whose countries are unified in their economic focus.
If education in the United States continues to fall behind that in countries like India and China, I’m sure the United States’ economy will also suffer. Take, for example, the U.S. auto industry. In the 1980s it seemed apparent to me that the Japanese might be formidable competitors to GM, Ford and Chrysler and that thousands of Indiana jobs might be at risk. Despite having conversations with the government officials in Indiana about the State’s vulnerability, I was consistently reassured that GM would always be the largest, most profitable car company in the world. Today, Anderson, Indiana (the location of a former GM plant) has nearly 20% unemployment and may be economically unrecoverable. And 60,000 Americans were fired from the U.S. auto industry last year – the largest exodus from a single industry in history.
As a result of my observations on education – and students’ motivation and dedication to it in India and China – I decided to make an hour long documentary film that compares and contrasts the high school experiences in the U.S., India and China called Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination. The title comes from the fact that every child has roughly 2,000,000 minutes of life during high school.
The documentary chronicles the lives of six high school students in the United States, India and China, taking you into the classrooms, the homes and the hang outs of these six teens. How they spend their two million minutes of high school will affect their economic prospects for the rest of their lives. Observing the various pressures and priorities of these students, their schools and their families provides insight into the changing nature of competition in the knowledge economy.
What I saw in that first grade Indian classroom three years ago shocked me, worried me and profoundly changed me. I truly hope that Americans can be brought to see what the Global Education Standard looks like. It is critical to the future of America’s economy that they understand how their children’s competitors are preparing for their careers and make informed decisions on how best to guide their children during those precious two million minutes of high school.
[SM: Please share your thoughts about the pros and cons of the education systems in the US, India and China, and discuss what each country ought to focus on.]
I have mixed views about this.
Education in undoubtedly the key to everything (and by the way with few exceptions Europe’s problem is as bad or worse than the US) but we need a much broader view of education than implied here. Social skills matter — I’m not talking about how to hold a knife and fork — I’m referring to critical interpersonal skills of alliance building or negotiating or leadership or entrepreneurialism.
You don’t learn most of these in classrooms or with your head down in a book. You learn them in play, in competition and (yes! I dare say it) just hangin’ out with your friends.
Too much work can make Jack (or Gautam or Mao) a dull boy.
I think that perhaps the author is overstating the quality of education in India (I cant speak to China since I have never lived/studied there). While there is no doubt about the level of focus there is on education in general in India/China I reckon there is a fairly substantial variance in quality of education.
So the US would be prudent to try and move away from its jock culture in HS where sporting achievements bestow greatness. However, there is something to be said of rounded education which often lacks in India. I have seen this first hand.
I look forward to seeing the changes that come about in the next several decades.
This is an interesting post considering coming from a very able brain behind it. I don’t have access to this documentary and had to read through some of the articles and reviews on the Internet including some of the videos on YouTube. Which couldn’t give me answers to some of the obvious questions or thoughts come while reading the above thoughts about the schooling system.
1) A Bangalore school is not the best sample for an ‘Indian School’ which can be used to draw some serious conclusion about the education system of India. In fact to understand Indian School and the students deciding on the sample students and schools itself would be a good amount of research work. Same I guess would be true for China as well as US.
2) When we are talking about a system and comparing them I would rather be very much methodical about defining the problem statement and see on what parameters my judgement of something good or something bad stands on and come up with an acceptable plan of measuring them and then compare.
However, as Sramana suggested if we want to talk about the schooling system of India I can talk about my understanding and observations in an absolute terms and my thinking of that as good or bad and how school is helping them out in their growth as a confident, intelligent human being.
a) The student is in the school 7-8 hours a day 5 days a week. Why any student need to study more than 7-8 hours a day to learn the subjects they are learning I am not clear. Every student is given a bunch of home work besides the school teaching system doesn’t ensure that the kid has learned properly or not. So it needs more attention than what it should take at home for the students to understand and learn the subjects.
b) When all the students of a class say that some subject is hard and not interesting, I believe it is time for the school to have a serious look on the methodology of teaching and the teacher itself.
c) I remember those days when after coming back from school we used to run to the playground to play football/cricket and other team games and the delay of mother calling at the back for eating something after coming back from the school even was very much distracting. Now-a-days in the upcoming cities of India there is no resemblance of the playgrounds much and people are forced to be at home or go to small park (if available) for running/jogging (missing the fun of the play till the dusk or till parents start looking for you.) if a park is available at all. In this condition of new life style challenges I believe the schools have some added responsibilities to build the personalities and emotional qualities of the students by providing them enough opportunity to have team efforts and team building exercises where they can build their negotiations and leadership qualities and ‘find out’ what else they like in their life besides studying.
d) Building respect to all people irrespective of their profession needs to be built up through planned activities. As the student spends cream of their time in the school it makes a lot of sense that school takes care of programmes by which the students understands that all professions are equal in terms of profession. Its more of a socio-economic problem but my guess is the students who says they want to be engineer, doctor, scientists never saw a great policeman in their life (just as an example) or even haven’t got into a discussion whereby they know what great things some of the other professions can also do. So the choice of profession mostly goes by what they see in the society and through the parents eyes at times.
There is a long list of such things which can be pointed out and can be thought off but I believe there is science of grooming a student and that considers all above points and the issues which we see are more related to implementations of those plans which is govern by resource and people.
Santanu, Sameer, Brazel -
All of you are pointing out the key issue with the meat-grinder education system: lack of a well-rounded perspective, team-skills, leadership skills, etc. Neither extreme is good. The lack of rigor isn’t desirable, either, but neither is the complete focus on academics / math and science alone.
As for the lack of uniformity in the education systems across India, China, US - I totally agree (and I have seen the film). It takes a “good” school in India and a Good school in China, and compares with very average schools in the US.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison.
However, the reason I invited Bob to write this column is to put the topic on the table - of a desirable education system at the K-12 level.
That, I believe, is worth discussing.
Sramana
Yes, this is most definitely worth discussing! However, as has already been noted, the competitive challenge of K-12 systems in China, India, etc. is not as black and white as some in the US might think. Schools in China and India have enormous challenges and varying degrees of quality. And so do we in the US, just maybe different challenges.
When I worked on math & science (STEM) reform as an appointee at the US Department of Education, we always had a steady stream of high level visitors from the education and related ministries/agencies of China, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc. They would always tell me their students were great at taking tests, but they had trouble thinking independently and being creative. I always told them that any creativity, risk-taking, or initiative in US young people was something that probably took root outside of the classroom. Yet, in various discussions to this day, both sides are still asking the same questions. We need to get beyond the discovery stage, and explore possible solutions.
Frankly, I think that there needs to be a balance between curricular and extra-curricular approaches. With a few colleagues, I have started to work on this challenge, and I think if we execute well, then we will be able to open doors to future cooperation between young Chinese, Indian, and American students and early career entrepreneurs that will bring about more opportunities for economic growth for all, thanks to the color blind power of markets. Also, we need to get beyond the zero sum mentality and work to build both competitive and collaborative opportunities to learn from and work together to prepare our youth for the global marketplace. Just a thought.
Very glad that brilliant people like Bob Compton, Tom Friedman, and others are waking up to this issue at last. It’s about time we experimented with ways to help our students prepare for and navigate their careers subject to the realities of global markets.
Mike,
By the way, along those lines, I have been active
in the MIT alumni association, and we gave the feedback to the institute that its curriculum is producing nerds with no life-skills, not much team-skills, leadership skills, and other soft skills necessary for high-order success.
This is not to say that MIT doesn’t produce hugely successful people, it does. But the feedback, nonetheless, was apt, well-received, and over the last 4-5 years, MIT has started modifying its curriculum accordingly.
The point is, a middle-ground absolutely needs to be achieved between the 2 extremes of nerd-ville and prom/football-ville.
India is today more skilled towards nerd-ville, while the US is far more skewed towards prom/football-ville.
Bob Compton’s film - to be fair - does show how - for example - the Chinese girl is studying Ballet and Violin - besides excelling in the sciences.
Either way, I still go back to the point of rigor and discipline, and the desire to excel. People who possess the desire to excel in one genre, normally possess the desire to excel in multiple genres. Those who don’t, remain mediocre in everything they do in life.
Excellence is a way of life. It’s an attitude. And, in a way, it is this attitude, this way of life, and the supporting work ethic that gets you there - is what needs to be “taught” and “nurtured” in schools.
The rest of the curriculum can be balanced - between math/sciences, the humanities/arts, and sports.
The problem the US faces today, to a large extent, is Affluenza and Entitlitis in its K-12 kids, and even in Gen Y. How the education system will tackle that is an exercise in psychology, in therapy - not so much in the curriculum design.
Either way, I still go back to the point of rigor and discipline, and the desire to excel. People who possess the desire to excel in one genre, normally possess the desire to excel in multiple genres. Those who don’t, remain mediocre in everything they do in life.
This is a very stereotypical and conformist assessment. It fails to understand that contrarian streak which can really question the societal status-quo and make the contemporary thought process go topsy-turvy. There have been many great thinkers, societal change-agents, ’success’ stories (success as in generally agreed upon terms) who had never subscribed to such an outlook. There is and will be a big alternative for good education, and that is experience. Experience from the very foxhole at frontiers of life. India will not only produce competent zombies in the coming 20 years, but also herald a new era of thought and existence. And that excites me most.
One issue is role models. Bill Gates would probably rate as a role model to more students in Asia than I suspect would be the case in the US.
The second issue is the value of grit & hardwork. In Asia, it is made apparent right from a young age. Kids in Asia know that to excel in Education is a ticket to success.
Not that either issue by itself is a good thing. Both do contribute nonetheless, to the status quo discussed by the author.
Pukhraj,
Where is the contradiction between excellence and experience? I’m sorry, I don’t see the logic in your point.
Ask question to 100 average students and their parents why your kid goes to school. My guess would be 90% of them will say that I go to school to study. Study what? Study the subjects we have in our standard.
The whole perspective of schooling is coming from years as above and it was the same 100 years back and if a social change doesn’t happen would remain to be same in next 100 years.
Within this framework there are schools which try to come up with a well rounded planning for the students and the success may not be stellar in all those cases.
The challenges of good education system depends a big way on the delivery than planning. When we are talk about delivery we are talking about resources and people. You can try to get resources but solving the challenges about people is not that easy.
There would always be a difference between a good teacher and a not so good teacher whatever be the system. The teachers training program doesn’t help much.
How good teacher a person would be depends on his/her own childhood at times and what he/she has accepted in his life as the goal. There are always two ways of doing things. Doing it clinically and doing it by heart. A clinical performance from the teacher doesn’t always be very motivating but certainly delivers some value. That being said even the lack of teachers who can teach clinically is also very prominent.
The major problem as I see in teaching is scalability. The spark ‘I’ see in the eyes when ‘I’ teach my kids is very hard to scale. ‘I’ can’t teach 1000s of students. My believe is given resources and technology we can package the teaching ‘I’ do and make it scalable. I believe that would be another Vision 2020 venture.
Let me start with an assumption.
I assume Bob, Sramana and others who have commented so far agree that the real problem in India is more about ‘access to quality education’ for all children.Successive Governments, Legislatures and the civic society have failed in ensuring basic education of a reasonable quality to all the children of the country. And it doesn’t look like the problem is going to get solved in a jiffy.
So, keeping this ‘real’ problem aside, we could compare the ‘quality of education’ that a middle class child can get in a city/town in India ( a good school as SM put it) with his/her counterparts in China, US and Europe.
Apart from the balance between scholastic pursuits and life skills, we also need to bring some focus back on to moral sciences (Be a good person, respect elders, help the needy), imagination and creativity, and make learning (of all types) more fun.
I see kids in middle India pressurized by parents, peers, teachers, and the milieu to do well in Maths and Sciences.My American friends tell me about the pressure on their kids to be good at team sports. I don’t see the concept of ‘fun’ being valued any where.
So, here’s my formula for quality education experience any where:
1.Balance between studies, sports, life skills and Arts
2.Focus on creating conscientious and courageous citizens by giving the right moral cues
3.Focus on the fun element.
But in India we know our priority is to get all the children to a school, any school, feed them and teach them the basics in a cost effective manner.Only then can we even contemplate a comparison with other nations.
cheers,
Kumar
Is such a education actually good?Do Indian students realize what they are losing out ?Are these pressures of intellectual pursuits justifiable?
I lecture to postgraduate accounting students in Australia. We have a lot of students from India & China.
Our course is an issues based course and requires substantial analysis of issues and consideration of responses based upon situations - thus very few black or white answers.
Students from China - while extremely intelligent - have real trouble comprehending that we really want their opinion & not just a recitation of facts. Indian students - equally bright - seem to adapt to the idea that we are seeking their reasoned analysis of issues.
Thus it does make me wonder about the differences in education systems between the two countries?
While I absolutely agree that kids in the school mentioned in the article are amazingly aspirational, I would attribute their ambitions to the lack of resources available and the undeniable fact that you have to compete to survive in India and that becomes part of your DNA growing up.
I’d hate to see the Indian system replicated here (!) - but I’d like to see an emphasis on education - not so skewed towards the liberal arts, social studies becoming more world-centric, and plenty of opportunity for our kids to interact with aspirational kids such as those mentioned in the article. After all, the world is flat, right?
You can’t be resourceful an innovative unless you are put in a situation where resources are scarce. (”necessity is the mother of invention”)
I think thats the real problem, not so much the educational system. I am full of respect for our teachers here - they are dedicated and do an awesome job, given the open-endedness of the curriculum (At least CA standards are very open-ended.)
IMO in India the combination of a sucky education system, overcrowding everywhere (including the playground!), excellent family support and the extreme emphasis on education (again coming from the family) is what makes these kids so aspirational
Sramana, many thanks for the encouraging update on curriculum reform at MIT - - I had heard of some promising new directions there. Glad to get the confirmation, and please do keep up the real world evangelizing!
Balance is a key trait in ones education, and I agree that we need to find a middle way for both the US and transition economies like China and India.
Deans of engineering in the US have been setting out with new content and experiments for the last few years and I am more optimistic than ever. I recall the 2004 Power of Play conference at Stanford emphasizing the fun that comes from pursuing one’s passions in engineering and idea development, for example. I wish there were more events like that one to augment the STEM curriculum… It is so healthy for students to see passionate role models and practitioners, and not just hardnosed VCs and technocrats up on panels talking about due diligence and term sheets.
But the question Bob raises is about the 2 MM’s of high school. Everyone knows that here in the US, our higher education system is much more academically rigorous and competitive than the K-12 system, by orders of magnitude. But outside of a few elite schools in the US, friends of mine at good universities are alarmed at how much time they spend in remedial education in the early college years, at state schools where the bulk of our youth get their higher ed. High school reform spills over to them.
So, I have to admit that I am not optimistic about high schools in the US, in general. Without giving up completely, my friends and I are now focusing on gifted youth (age 15-22) in the US who are more likely to build on their capabilities in STEM fields, and are more prepared to benefit from transnational cooperative experiences in India and China working with young peers and mentors there.
In my experience, taking those young Americans who are suffering from a sense of entitlement and afflicted with apathy or affluenza to a 4 week international innovation camp to China, Korea, or Singapore offers a real wake up call. They go over like scared rabbits, and come back more energized and anxious to keep up and work with their new foreign friends. As we start to include young Indians in 2009 or 2010, I bet the effect will be even more profound.
I think that young gifted students and their mentors from the US, India, China, Japan and Korea are perhaps ready to begin learning together about teamwork, entrepreneurship, and global markets… Whether they pursue a start-up career at first is another issue. But eventually, my friends and I are betting that they will become successful entrepreneurs after they obtain more experience and learn how to profit from their mistakes. We also encourage the young students and early career professionals in our new programs to become philanthropists and social innovators who can bring about the next generation of progress and innovation through transnational cooperation (and also some competition in the market, of course).
But I prattle on… I liked what Kate had to say about the Chinese students. Ditto… And I dig your stuff!