The World is Flat: Do American Schools Realize it?

Tom Friedman's book, The World is Flat, has been on the New York Times' Best Sellers List for 62 weeks. In this brilliant book Friedman explains that the lines of communication and commerce no longer end at the edge of the city, state or nation. They stretch throughout the globe. Friedman explains that major companies are as likely, if not likelier, to develop contracts with Indian companies than it is to develop contracts with the company next door. My favorite anecdote from the book is that when somebody orders in the drive through line at McDonalds they are no longer guaranteed that they are even speaking to somebody inside the restaurant. A system has been set up in which drive through customers speak to a call center in the Western part of the U.S. Numerous McDonalds are using this service for efficiency purposes.

As I write this entry I am sitting at a Panera Bread in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Where are you? As an independent educational consultant I work with people developing curriculum, all over the nation. (I'm new at this: I hope one day soon to be working with people all over the world.) I've never met many of these people face to face and I haven't even spoken to some of them. However, we still work together efficiently because of the Internet and today's communications systems.

I have to wonder if today's schools are preparing students to enter the world of the Twenty-First Century or the United States of the late Twentieth Century. There is an incredible difference between the two time periods. As just one example, lets take foreign language. China is the fastest growing economy in the world. It is also already a Superpower. How many of our students are learning to speak Chinese? How many of our schools offer Chinese? I did an informal study a few weeks and was shocked that out of ten districts surveyed, only one offered Chinese. We live in a world in which fundamentalists, many of whom speak Arab, no longer constrain their religious practices and activism to a part of the world distant from our own. One might think that it would be a good idea to speak the same language as these individuals, so that we can seek to break down cultural barriers. No school that I surveyed offered Arabic. My mother could have studied Spanish and French in school. Schools continue to offer these languages.

As just one more example let's consider technology. My girlfriends sons go to a private school with a tuition of fifteen thousand dollars a year. A few weeks ago her nine year old son developed his own website. He was so proud of it and wanted to show it to his friends. When he came home from school I asked him if he showed any of his friends. He told me that he wasn't allowed to do so. He couldn't go on the computer. The teacher didn't let students use the computer without specific purposes as assigned by her. Can you imagine a teacher telling a student that they couldn't write with a pen unless something was specifically assigned? I don't mean to be picking on my girlfriend's son school. I'm pretty confident that the situation is the same in many schools.

I'm afraid that Tom Friedman's book has not had enough influence. Policymakers and educational leaders have read it. You can't attend a meeting in education without hearing about it. But classrooms and curriculum have not yet changed. We are missing the opportunity to educate a whole generation of children in the ways that they should be educated.