That Used to Be Us by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
The central thesis of this book is that the United States has strayed from its traditional success formula at a time of intense competition. While the authors focus on the United States, we face many of the same issues in Canada.
In the 1980s, America won the Cold War. However, we did not understand the
implications of this Pyrrhic victory. As a consequence, 2 billion "low wage but high skill" people from the former communist block adopted western concepts such as free markets, along with the fierce desire to obtain our standard of living. Meanwhile, the merging of communications and information technologies dropped barriers of distance between markets and countries.
Concurrently, America moved away from its traditional success formula. The authors suggest that this formula is composed of five pillars - public education, modern infrastructure, keeping the doors open to immigration, government support for basic research and development, and the maintenance of necessary regulations on private sector activity. Other countries have strove to adopt and improve upon the American success formula, undermining the American competitive advantage in the process.
The challenge is that this formula for success must be altered as the world changes. At key points of history, leaders arose who could understand what was happening and rallied the public to upgrade the nation's formula for success. The problem is that there has been no "Perl Harbour" or "Sputnik" moment to stimulate the drive for a collective answer. The challenges facing the country are gradual in nature, such as spending beyond one's means or job losses at a local factory, like the preverbal frog in a pot of warming water.
Part of the current problem is a mismatch between the skills possessed by the workforce and the skills required for people to be employable. In a world with billions of new competitors (and customers), being "average" in work skills and job performance is increasingly a recipe for underemployment and job insecurity.
The authors focused a significant part of their book on the system of public education, both the K to 12 and post-secondary systems, where an urgent need for reform exists. Being good is no longer good enough, when schools should be comparing their performance against the best in the world, not the best in the province. For example, in one international university competition hosted by IBM, the top six student teams came from China and Russia. The top Canadian team was only 12th. None of the American teams placed in the top twelve.
The authors stressed, that of all the "variables under a school's control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching", everything else is a rounding error. According to one estimate, "a teacher in the top 15 percent of quality can, in one year, add more than $20,000 to a student's lifetime earnings. If this figure is correct, a superb teacher exerts a tremendous multiplier effect, adding hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to the future earnings of his or her students.
A string of superb or poor teachers can literally determine the future of a young person. The problem is that schools do not systematically focus on the development of exceptional teachers.
While the book obviously cannot provide all the answers, it can get a conversation going by at least asking some of the right questions.
- Reviewed by John Shepherd, a former board trustee at the Prince George Public Library
