JOSE DE LA ISLA: Feeling smug about education reform» Standard-Times:
"SAN ANGELO, Texas — HOUSTON — A major shock to the education system came during World War II when the armed services reported an appalling degree of illiteracy among recent school graduates. They complained the typical public-school graduate had trouble writing a respectable English sentence and many soldiers were woefully ignorant of elementary facts about the nation’s history.
With the 1957 launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 got the federal government involved in all levels of education that had previously been almost exclusively a state and local public-policy niche. The federal government encouraged strengthened curriculums in math, science, languages and disciplines and increased grants, loans and graduate scholarships."
In his 1959 book, “Education and Freedom,” Adm. Hyman Rickover claimed low-level knowledge impeded the United States from competing better with the Soviet Union, which was preparing its youth for a technological world. “Even the average child now needs almost as good an education as the average middle- and upper-class child used to get in the college-preparatory schools,” he wrote.
Then the mid-20th century’s focus on Cold War military and economic security led to a paradigm shift. Juan Enriquez of Harvard Business School argued in his 2000 book, “As the Future Catches You,” that nations previously needed massive agriculture and industrialization to prosper.
Now educated, entrepreneurial people were replacing natural resources as wealth. The U.S.S.R.’s gold, oil, uranium and forests could not keep it from going broke while its great scientists and mathematicians lacked freedoms that come with entrepreneurship.
Enriquez pointed out that Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Congo, Mexico, Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela had vast natural resources but their people were poorer than 20 years before. Small countries, lacking natural resources, often generated more real wealth per person than large, resource-rich countries.
"SAN ANGELO, Texas — HOUSTON — A major shock to the education system came during World War II when the armed services reported an appalling degree of illiteracy among recent school graduates. They complained the typical public-school graduate had trouble writing a respectable English sentence and many soldiers were woefully ignorant of elementary facts about the nation’s history.
With the 1957 launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, the National Defense Education Act of 1958 got the federal government involved in all levels of education that had previously been almost exclusively a state and local public-policy niche. The federal government encouraged strengthened curriculums in math, science, languages and disciplines and increased grants, loans and graduate scholarships."
In his 1959 book, “Education and Freedom,” Adm. Hyman Rickover claimed low-level knowledge impeded the United States from competing better with the Soviet Union, which was preparing its youth for a technological world. “Even the average child now needs almost as good an education as the average middle- and upper-class child used to get in the college-preparatory schools,” he wrote.
Then the mid-20th century’s focus on Cold War military and economic security led to a paradigm shift. Juan Enriquez of Harvard Business School argued in his 2000 book, “As the Future Catches You,” that nations previously needed massive agriculture and industrialization to prosper.
Now educated, entrepreneurial people were replacing natural resources as wealth. The U.S.S.R.’s gold, oil, uranium and forests could not keep it from going broke while its great scientists and mathematicians lacked freedoms that come with entrepreneurship.
Enriquez pointed out that Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Congo, Mexico, Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela had vast natural resources but their people were poorer than 20 years before. Small countries, lacking natural resources, often generated more real wealth per person than large, resource-rich countries.