The United States Can Learn from High School Students in India, China
May 2008
STANFORD
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —Most Americans have heard that the
United States lags China and India in math and science education, but they
often dismiss that reality, assuming that the leaders emphasize rote learning
at the expense of teaching well-rounded original thinking.
Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Robert Compton says he carried those same
assumptions until he traveled to India. There he found high school
students as proficient in English literature and geography as they were in
calculus. They had clear career plans and approached their goals with a focus
he never saw in the United
States, even in his own two daughters who
were straight A students at an exclusive private school.
Realizing that no statistic could do justice to what he had seen on the ground,
Compton launched a new career as filmmaker, documenting students’ high
school curriculums and study habits in India, China and the United States.
The result was 2 Million Minutes,
the film Compton
screened on May 14 at the Graduate School of Business. He talked with MBA
students about his concerns that the weaknesses in the U.S. school
system today could handicap the entire American economy for generations to
come, and how students could help bridge the disparity.
“When Finland
was ranked number one in math and science education, I wasn’t so
worried,” said Compton, president of medical device maker Sofamor Danek.
“But when it’s the two largest countries in the world that have
fast growing economies and people who are coming out of poverty and driven to
achieve, I am worried.”
Compton cited a
calculation from Stanford economist Eric Hanushek (the Paul and Jean Hanna
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution) that a nation’s gross national
product growth correlates directly to the level of math and science scores
achieved by its students.
Despite his own concern, Compton said the best
response to this educational disparity is to forge better bonds with
India and China. He criticized the United States for severely limiting
the number
of foreign engineers who could immigrate on H1B work visas, and he
urged GSB
students—some of whom take part in cooperative programs with the Indian
Institute of Management, Bangalore or China’s
Tsinghua School of Economics and Management —to collaborate with
overseas
talents on new businesses. “We can not keep the brains at a
distance,” he said.
The title, 2 Million Minutes,
represents the approximate number of minutes in a four-year period, to show how
different students spend their time. As the film goes back and forth between
typical days in the three countries it shows American students attending
football games in their high school’s brand new $30 million stadium, while
Chinese students display medals won in math competitions. Indian students meet
for teacher-led study sessions at 7 a.m. on Saturday mornings while their
American counterparts gather at a friend’s house to casually study for a
test with the television on and Grey’s
Anatomy competing for their attention.
While the Americans attend sports, socialize, work in part-time jobs and study,
their Chinese and Indian counterparts pretty much study nonstop. And while even
the best American students say they don’t feel challenged in schools, the
most brilliant in China and India are
constantly challenged to learn more.
The average U.S.
student, his film states, spends 900 hours in a classroom and 1,500 hours in
front of the television. And, by the end of high school, Chinese students have
spent twice as much time studying as Americans.
The experience led Compton to radically change
his own daughters’ education incorporating more tutoring and to develop
his own math testing system based on what he saw in India to better parse comprehension
and identify areas of weakness.
But he said that nationwide, this was not a challenge that could be fixed
quickly, since it would require a dramatic shift in culture and values.
“The fault lies not in our schools but in ourselves,” he said.
“We are a sports, recreation and leisure country. We need to lift
academic and intellectual achievements at least on par with athletic
achievements.”
As a first step, Compton
has already started working with some communities to help them more publicly
recognize and reward the best students. He said the United States needs to
appreciate how valuable engineers will be in the future, not just to create
better software but to rebuild a host of ordinary consumer products like
washing machines to make them use water, space or some other resource more
efficiently.
“To me, this is one of the most exciting times in history to be an
engineer,” he said. “Everything will have to be reinvented.”
The speech and film screening were sponsored by the Business School’s
Global Management Program.
—Andrea Orr
