On a citizen's advisory committee, I was not long ago in the company of educators. As those meetings go, after the settling of business, conversation turns to whomever has the balance of chairs. So one is audience to the passion, the professional ambivalence, of a public administrator — excitement over possibilities, distress from inspiration's material constraints.
That morning we visitors were told of Two Million Minutes, a documentary chronicling the high school tenures of six teenagers, a pair each from the United States, India, and China. By the solemnity, one could figure that, whether or not they had seen the movie, school officials present agreed with its premise. It is that the three countries "are preparing their students for the future" dissimilarly, perhaps inequitably. Executive Producer Robert Compton underwrote Two Million Minutes to proclaim "the universal importance of education today, and address what many are calling a crisis for US schools regarding chronically low scores in math and science indicators."
Since Compton isn't claiming perspicacity, but rather that the crisis is obvious, a skeptic may proceed before watching the film. Alarm at America's educational inferiority began over twenty-five years ago. Attendant to Japan's conspicuous rise were longer school calendars and humbling comparisons between test batteries. George H.W. Bush, drenched in the light of a new world order, spake: "by the year 2000 US students must be the first in the world in math and science achievement." The edict went unanswered, and it could stand that classes do graduate in India and China under more rigor. Compton, however, wants Two Million Minutes to be about "a battle being fought around the world for the global economy," and that is a non sequitur.
The work and its academic subscription appear the product of seeing only nails when limited to a hammer. Should one prefer a degree in math and science or financial security, even professional aptness? Assessing the "battle" in frames of two million minutes: the American formula, in 2002, was nearly eight times China's GDP at per-capita purchasing power parity and beat India's by over tenfold. Last year, China's billion managed to pare the US lead to a quintupling; India remained at its denominator from one high school class prior. The bachelor's degree today earns on average, according to the Census Bureau, about 6 percent less than it did four years ago. Disappointing for the American undergrad, but respectively constituting fifty and thirty times Indian and Chinese median household incomes.
A fact adduced in favor of the movie is the mastodonic size of school systems in China and India. All right. If the Indians produce enough scientists to populate California, good on them — theirs is a teething democracy, and exchanges between it and the United States, cooperative or competitive, already benefit both countries. China? Insouciance over the Communist Party's totalitarian presence has allowed a paralogism to be made. Robert Compton notes that Two Million Minutes is the "first introduction to high school in India and China" for its viewers. He might consider Princeton student Chris Xu who, growing up in a "first-generation Chinese immigrant family," wrote in a business periodical that he doubts Beijing's successful market reforms will "lead to a reversal of the US-China brain drain." Immigrants, Xu argues, "have built new lives in America, achieving economic success as engineers, scientists, doctors, and businessmen," and that "as for replacing America in its traditional role as the beacon for immigrants seeking a better way of life, China still has a long way to go."
Must knowledge be got only through formal instruction — can it? Compton has held screenings at several colleges, including Harvard University at the beginning of last month. "I was surprised," he recorded of his visit with graduate students, "by the passion with which many defended the status quo." Compton's feathers had been ruffled, and easily, judging by a review of the trip a few days later. In an open letter, Compton wrote, "Candidly, I don't think I've met a more close-minded and dogmatic bunch of people — except maybe in a religious cult." He concluded with apostrophe: "Where are America's inquisitive, thoughtful, open-minded graduate students — eager to learn how other countries educate their students?"
Well, then. Two Million Minutes is something to see, though its creators can't begrudge its quality as supplemental. Preoccupied with erudition, Compton may have forgotten — despite his own career as an investor — the importance of being astute. There are tens of thousands of mathematicians, engineers and scientists who would be without their present and gainful employment, were it not for the most famous Harvard dropout of all.