Nicholas Kristoff is part of the New York Times stable of amateurs with high-profile unfounded opinions about education, and last week he decided that maybe we should be more like Taiwan or Vietnam.
He waves vaguely in the direction of societal commitment to education (the headline is "What if the Valedictorians in America's Schools Were the Cool Kids," which, in assuming that they aren't already the cool kids, reveals its own biases). He talks about visiting schools in Asia since the 1980s. "Every time I visit, I feel a pang of envy for societies that seem to value education more than America does."
Okay, I feel his pain here. Our country's attitude toward education mirrors our attitude toward young humans-- we make a lot of noise about valuing them, but when the rubber meets the road, it turns out there are plenty of other things we value way more.
Kristoff, however, is not so much focused on what society can do to live up to educational value as he is on how such a value will inspire students to bootstrap the hell out of themselves. He focuses on stories like the girl who works full time and studies full time so that she can go to college (she sleeps for two AM hours at her workplace if things are slow). Or the student who eschews dating because in these countries "respect for education is so deep that it can even overwhelm youthful hormones."
He nods to the idea that such obsession stifles creativity and robs children of fun and youth. He also nods to the fact that some nations devote huge amounts of money to education (Taiwan mandates 22.5% of net budget revenues go to education). He notes these things with a "Yes, but" and swings right back to promoting a culture obsessed with education so that young humans will feel moved to grab those bootstraps. He Yesbuts his way past poverty, inequity, and injustice without examining how this A) restricts access to both education and bootstraps and B) how education obsession doesn't seem to have mitigated the issues.
Most of all, he doesn't examine the Rugged American biases that lead him to center this story about education valuation on students rather than, say, political leaders and other adults who throw society's weight behind education. This is the Rugged Individualist dream-- students who rise up and doggedly pursue education without any powerful adults doggedly working to make that pursuit of education more doable. It is an Asian version of a familiar story-- the heartwarming portrait of a young human overcoming obstacles without ever questioning why those obstacles are requiring overcoming in the first place.
Kristoff might want to take a look at the work of Yong Zhao, the China-born scholar who has plenty to say about the Asian brand of education obsession.
But mostly he might want to look at his vision (and it's a vision shared by many) that a more education-valuing society would look pretty much exactly like our society right now, except that students would work harder.
He ends the piece with some questions: "Maybe we could acknowledge the inequity of local school finance that results in sending rich kids to good schools and poor kids to weak schools? Perhaps politicians could stop demonizing universities and taxing their endowments? What if we respected human capital as much as financial capital?"
Those are not bad questions. But they need to come at the beginning of a piece, not as a sort of post-script of a piece that is mostly about something else entirely.
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