Blog
The United States’ World Cup of Mediocrity
June 8th, 2010 - 10:42am
Filed under Education
Gen Next Senior Director Wade Lairsen, is short on Team USA's chances at the FIFA World Cup this summer, but long on our children's future. Read below to see why he feels our attitudes toward each are connected.
In a few days, 32 nations will step on to the world stage and engage in the fiercest battle in four years. National pride, billions in revenue and many fans would say, global domination is at stake.
Despite the fact that Team USA has the best equipment and resources at its fingertips, we will not win the World Cup in South Africa this summer. The team will certainly mount a formidable effort, but will not go all the way. Teams from the Netherlands, Argentina, and Brazil have a far better chance at winning than Team USA. Why is that?
Undoubtedly, our athletes are as capable of being trained to win as their global counterparts. What then, holds our team back? Is it the system in which they play? Is it the comparative lack of national focus on soccer?
One thing is certain. Instead of insisting that Team USA brings home a win, we have lowered our expectations. Our team's best hope comes in the first round, where a victory over England would be an upset the likes of which hasn't been seen since 1950. Winners win championship titles; they don't get excited by merely winning round one.
One might argue that expectation to win the World Cup in a game like soccer is unrealistic. But acceptance of our own mediocrity is a reality with far greater implications.
A similar battle is taking place where stakes are much higher. This battle is fought not on the soccer fields, but rather in elementary, middle and high school classrooms around the world.
Here, too, the United States has lowered its expectations and accepted its own mediocrity. Currently, students in the United States rank 25th in Math and 21st in Science among 30 developed countries. They continue to fall behind their counterparts in countries, such as Finland, Canada, and the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, the Czech Republic spends only one-third as much per student as the United States does.
In recent years, we have been somewhat successful at narrowing the achievement gap between minority and non-minority students, domestically; yet we have not begun to address our own global achievement gap.
Team USA has undoubtedly been working since the 1950s--albeit without success--to repeat that historic victory and Americans have been talking for a longer period of time about fixing the problems in education. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch authored the groundbreaking bestseller "Why Johnny Can't Read," which cited system-wide failures resulting in the fact that students in the United States were dramatically less literate than their counterparts in Germany and the United Kingdom. Despite the book's popularity and that it has been long-hailed as a breakthrough in identifying challenges in the American education system, the problem persisted. In 1981, Flesch followed up with "Why Johnny Still Can't Read," where he noted that the education system's response to the issues he raised more than 25 years prior had been more about protecting its own image and monopoly, than actually addressing the core issue.
Today, for the first time in history, this generation of Americans will be less literate than the generation before it. That means Johnny could not read and Johnny, Jr. will be even less literate.
When today's elementary school students graduate high school, will they be prepared to step on to that field of competition and mount a formidable economic defense (or, preferably, offense) against the brute force of China with its seemingly endless amount of cash available for investment, or the agility of India which is able to replicate the latest US business models almost overnight?
Much like Team USA competing in South Africa this summer, the United States certainly has the best equipment and resources available, which could be used to educate our children. We must ask ourselves then, are our students inherently less capable of learning than students in Finland?
Certainly, that's not the case. Our students continue to fail because we lack national focus on their individual education and have accepted our own mediocrity and the broken system in which they struggle every day. It seems we have forgotten that our education system exists for one reason: to educate our children.
Sadly, it also seems that those running the system treat it more as a job bank focused on pensions and retirement plans, than the cultivation of opportunities for our kids and our country's future economic capabilities. While it would be hyperbole to say that global domination is at stake in South Africa this summer, global position is most certainly what's at stake in classrooms across the United States every day.
The US is still the world's largest economy, and also competes quite well on the world stage of the Olympics. If soccer teaches us anything, however, it should teach us that acceptance of our own mediocrity is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The stakes are too high, the future of a nation demands it, and the United States must accept nothing less than a win.
U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A!