U.S. Schools: Not That Bad

America's educational system is easier than those in China and India—but it's still teaching valuable life lessons

In "BusinessWeek":

Students have 2 million minutes—the time from the beginning of eighth grade to high school graduation—to build the intellectual foundation they'll need for professional success. That's the premise of a new documentary, Two Million Minutes, that's making waves in education and political circles.

The film tracks six students—two each in the U.S., India, and China—during their senior year of high school. The Indian and Chinese students work diligently on math and science, while the American students work hard but appear less focused and leave plenty of time for video games and social lives. The message is that because of our education system, we're getting left behind.

Two Million Minutes provides a provocative glimpse of the global competition now facing U.S. students. And the conclusion many are drawing is that to keep our edge, our children need to study more math and science and work harder. It is true that the U.S. education system should be improved; that's essential for economic success.

But the solution isn't for us to become just like our new competitors. We need to do what we do better.

Years Ahead and Miles Apart

The documentary was produced by Bob Compton, a venture capitalist. Compton says that an increasing number of companies in his portfolio are moving research and development to India and China. To understand why, he traveled to India and visited their schools. He was stunned by the career aspirations of children as young as 5 and the advanced education that middle and high school students were receiving. Indian students in the same grade as his teenage daughters were two or three years ahead in math, physics, biology, and even subjects like world history and English literature. He left India wondering how his daughters, and American children in general, would be able to compete in the 21st century.

Two Million Minutes is the fruit of that wondering. One of the two U.S. students depicted is Brittany Brechbuhl, 17, who's in the top 3% of the graduating class of a highly ranked school in Carmel, Ind. She dreams of becoming a doctor but also wants to enjoy life. Neil Ahrendt, 18, is senior class president at Carmel and a National Merit semifinalist. But he isn't sure what career he wants to pursue.

The American students are compared with 17-year-olds Apoorva Uppala and Rohit Sridharan from Bangalore and Hu Xiaoyuan and Jin Ruizhang from Shanghai. All four know exactly what they want to be when they grow up. They labor on weekdays and weekends to prepare for entrance exams at top universities. They excel in math and science. Jin even competes in international math tournaments.

The film depicts the Indian and Chinese students as well-rounded and having much more parental support than the Americans. For example, Rohit sings in an American-style rock band, and Hu is learning the violin. Rohit's parents and sister routinely help him with his physics homework, and Hu's parents hired one of China's most prominent violinists to encourage their daughter to study music.

On the other hand, Neil talks about having coasted through most of his high school years and having lucked out by gaining a full scholarship to college. The former high school football team captain works part-time at a restaurant. Brittany watches Grey's Anatomy on TV while studying math and looks forward to joining a sorority and partying in college. Both are at the top of their classes, but they lack the ambition and focus of their Indian and Chinese counterparts.

Social Skills Can Pay Off

Being the parent of two American kids and having studied for a short time in India, I can personally relate to the documentary. (I also am interviewed in it.) Education in India can be greatly challenging and fiercely competitive. Children are brought up to believe that education is everything. It will make the difference between success and starvation. So from their early years, Indian children work long and hard. Most of their childhood is spent memorizing books on advanced subjects.

On the other hand, Neil and Brittany reminded me very much of my children. Life is a lot easier here.

But things aren't as dire for U.S. students as they might appear in the documentary. As an academic, I have been researching engineering education and have taught many graduates of Indian, Chinese, and American universities. It can take longer for Indians and Chinese to develop crucial real-world skills that come more easily for some Americans. Yes, U.S. teens work part-time, socialize, and party. But the independence and social skills they develop give them a big advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks.

A Push for Improvement

The graduates of top Indian and Chinese engineering schools are usually brilliant. They are adept at math and science. Some Indian and Chinese parents invest their life savings to send their children to America because they know the education they receive there will best prepare them to be successful entrepreneurs and business leaders.

But the reality is that the vast majority of India and China's children don't receive quality schooling or make it to college. I estimate that Apoorva and Rohit represent at best 5% of the children in India.

Compton says his documentary doesn't prescribe solutions. But he hired math and science tutors for his daughters, even though they were at the top of their class at a premier private school. And this documentary has become a key part of a campaign, ED in '08, sponsored by backers such as Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates. They advocate a greater emphasis on math and science education and more study time.

There is no doubt that U.S. education can and should be improved. In the global economy, skills are going to provide the competitive edge. But it will take more than math and science. Our children also need to learn geography, literature, language, and culture. Creativity and innovation come from a broad education and independent thinking. We need sociologists and historians as well as mathematicians.

Moreover, we need to create the excitement and demand that makes our children want to become engineers and scientists (BusinessWeek.com, 10/26/07). There is no shortage of these skills in the U.S., but these professions just aren't cool. In India and China, engineers and scientists are regarded highly; here they are called nerds or worse.

Upgrading the Current Workforce

We also need to focus on the 120 million in the existing workforce. That is where the entrepreneurs come from (BusinessWeek.com, 4/30/08), and these are the people whose skills need to be upgraded most urgently. We've got to make them more competitive; we simply can't wait for the next generation.

And even though so few Indians and Chinese receive a high-quality education now, that will change with the emergence of a middle class in both nations. India's middle class now constitutes 350 million people—more than the entire population of the U.S. Both India and China are making massive investments in education. If India can become a technology superpower by providing good education to less than 5% of its population, what will happen when they reach 50%?

Bottom line: Our competitors are working very hard to be innovative and entrepreneurial like us. There are many things we need to fix—not just math and science education. We need to compete on our strengths, not theirs.

Vivek Wadhwa, a former tech entrepreneur, is the Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School and an executive-in-residence at Duke University. He writes a column on policy issues affecting entrepreneurs every month.

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Exercise Your Brain, or Else You’ll ... Uh ...

In "New York Times":

SAN FRANCISCO — When David Bunnell, a magazine publisher who lives in Berkeley, Calif., went to a FedEx store to send a package a few years ago, he suddenly drew a blank as he was filling out the forms.

“I couldn’t remember my address,” said Mr. Bunnell, 60, with a measure of horror in his voice. “I knew where I lived, and I knew how to get there, but I didn’t know what the address was.”

Mr. Bunnell is among tens of millions of baby boomers who are encountering the signs, by turns amusing and disconcerting, that accompany the decline of the brain’s acuity: a good friend’s name suddenly vanishing from memory; a frantic search for eyeglasses only to find them atop the head; milk taken from the refrigerator then put away in a cupboard.

“It’s probably one of the most frightening aspects of the changes we undergo as we age,” said Nancy Ceridwyn, director of educational initiatives at the American Society on Aging. “Our memories are who we are. And if we lose our memories we lose that groundedness of who we are.”

At the same time, boomers are seizing on a mounting body of evidence that suggests that brains contain more plasticity than previously thought, and many people are taking matters into their own hands, doing brain fitness exercises with the same intensity with which they attack a treadmill.

Decaying brains, or the fear thereof, have inspired a mini-industry of brain health products — not just supplements like coenzyme Q10, ginseng and bacopa, but computer-based fitter-brain products as well.

Nintendo’s $19.99 Brain Age 2, a popular video game of simple math and memory exercises, is one. Posit Science’s $395 computer-based “cognitive behavioral training” exercises are another. MindFit, a $149 software-based program, combines cognitive assessment of more than a dozen different skills with a personalized training regimen based on that assessment. And for about $10 a month, worried boomers can subscribe to Web sites like Lumosity.com and Happy-Neuron.com, which offer a variety of cognitive training exercises.

Alvaro Fernandez, whose brain fitness and consulting company, SharpBrains, has a Web site focused on brain fitness research. He estimates that in 2007 the market in the United States for so-called neurosoftware was $225 million.

Mr. Fernandez pointed out that compared with, say, the physical fitness industry, which brings in $16 billion a year in health club memberships alone, the brain fitness software industry is still in its infancy. Yet it is growing at a 50 percent annual rate, he said, and he expects it to reach $2 billion by 2015.

From Hula Hoops to Corian countertops, marketers have done very well over the six decades guessing the desires of the generation born after World War II. Now they are making money on that generation’s fears, and it is not just computerized flash card makers with the money-making ideas. Doctors and geneticists have also tapped into the market.

Boomers believe they have ample reason to worry. There is no definitive laboratory test to detect Alzheimer’s disease. Doctors rely on symptoms to make the diagnosis, and most think that by the time symptoms show up the brain damage is already extensive.

By 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, 11 million to 16 million Americans will have the disease.

“Most people when they turn 50 begin to look at forgetfulness with more seriousness,” said Dr. Gene Cohen, the director of the Center for Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University.

“When you misplace your keys when you’re 25, you don’t pay any attention to it,” he said. “But when you do the identical thing at 50 or older, you raise an eyebrow.”

Lisa C., 47, a clinical psychologist in the San Francisco Bay area, who preferred not to disclose her last name for fear that friends and colleagues would question her mental faculties, misplaced her cellphone one day a few years ago.

She called it from her home phone but heard nothing. Finally, while making dinner a few hours later, she found it — in the freezer.

She was so unnerved, not just by that but also by the poor results of a subsequent mental status test, that she had an MRI done on her brain. The diagnosis: perfectly normal. Dr. Cohen said people can also overreact, attributing absent-minded actions to failing brains, when it is actually simple distractibility that is to blame.

Nancy Cutler, 51, a publication designer in Piedmont, Calif., grew worried about her brain a few years ago when she drove her car to work one day, then, forgetting she had done so, took the bus home.

“It was pretty embarrassing to have my kid call me and say, ‘what do you mean you’re on the bus?’ ”

Ms. Cutler reminded herself that she was preparing for her son’s bar mitzvah, going through a stressful period and was very distracted. But she was concerned enough to report the incident to her physician, and ask if there were certain supplements she should be taking. The doctor told her to take up activities that challenged her mind. (Ms. Cutler said she had not done anything yet, because it is “a real time commitment.”)

Dr. Cohen, who recently conducted a study of people born from 1946 to 1955, the first half of the baby boom, said he was struck by the number of respondents who believe they can do things on their own to enhance the vitality of their brains.

“There is a gradual growing awareness that challenging your brain can have positive effects," Dr. Cohen said. He said the plasticity of the brain is directly related to the production of new dendrites, the branched, tree-like neural projections that carry electrical signals through the brain “Every time you challenge your brain it will actually modify the brain,” he said. “We can indeed form new brain cells, despite a century of being told it’s impossible.”

In pursuit of his own dendritic growth, Dr. Cohen plans to take up the piano again after years of not playing. He is also sketching out a science-fiction novel he hopes to write.

Dr. Cohen says that although he understands the fear of Alzheimer’s, many people are unduly anxious about it.

“The bottom line question to ask is, Is your forgetfulness fundamentally interfering with how you function?” said Dr. Cohen. “If it doesn’t fundamentally mess up your work or social life, it’s among the normal variants.”

Relief — or heightened anxiety — can come with a better sense of one’s genetic risk. Start-ups like Navigenics, 23andMe and deCODE genetics are charging around $1,000 to test an individual’s DNA for various risk factors, including Alzheimer’s.

Mr. Bunnell, whose magazine, Eldr, is aimed at aging boomers, took the 23andMe test and learned that his genetic risk is below average. Still, Mr. Bunnell is not sure he trusts the report, as one of his grandparents had dementia, and his mother may have had Alzheimer’s although no diagnosis was made.

To keep such moments as his FedEx embarrassment to a minimum, Mr. Bunnell now does regular brain calisthenics, largely avoiding expensive software in favor of simpler solutions. He works at memorizing the numbers that swirl around his daily life — credit cards, PINs and phone numbers — and devises mnemonics for remembering people’s names. “Smart people find new ways to exercise their brains that don’t involve buying software or taking expensive workshops," he said.