A Life-changing Trip to India

By Bob Compton, Guest Author

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.]