|
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently told the nation s governors that America high school education is obsolete . He said, When I compare our high schools to what I see when I m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In 2001, India graduate almost a million more students from college than the Unites States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor s degrees as the US and has six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. America is falling behind. Gates was describing a global economy in which the chance to move up into a better economic life is slipping overseas, along with jobs that can be performed anywhere----manufacturing in China, technology support in India, online order fulfillment across borders. The Internet brings Bhutan and Bangalore just as close to our offices and living rooms as Boise. Maybe closer. Our children s competitors are not the other schools in the district or the state or even the nation. They are the technologically literate young people in Taiwan, India, Korea, and other developing nations. For today s American students , learning and retraining will be a lifelong experience. In The World Is Flat, a recent book analyzing the shift in the global economy, Thomas Friedman points out that the dot. com bubble inspired a massive outlay of capital to connect the continents. Undersea cable, universal software, high-tech imagery, and Google have erased geography. College graduates in Latin America, Central Asia, India, China, and Russia can do the information work Americans used to count on---in many cases better and in all cases cheaper. | 
