“Compassionate capitalism. Think it sounds like an oxymoron? Think again,” said Gunther. “Even as America is supposedly turning conservative on social issues, big business is moving in the other direction.”
Parenting
No discussion of compassionate flatism would be complete without also discussing the need for improved parenting. Helping individuals adapt to a flat world is not only the job of governments and companies. It is also the job of parents. They too need to know in what world their kids are growing up and what it will take for them to thrive. Put simply, we need a new generation of parents ready to administer tough love: There comes a time when you've got to put away the Game Boys, turn off the television set, put away the iPod, and get your kids down to work.
The sense of entitlement, the sense that because we once dominated global commerce and geopolitics-and Olympic basketball-we always will, the sense that delayed gratification is a punishment worse than a spanking, the sense that our kids have to be swaddled in cotton wool so that nothing bad or disappointing or stressful ever happens to them at school is, quite simply, a growing cancer on American society. And if we don't start to reverse it, our kids are going to be in for a huge and socially disruptive shock from the flat world. While a different approach by politicians is necessary, it is not sufficient.
David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning president of Caltech, knows what it takes to get your child ready to compete against the cream of the global crop. He told me that he is struck by the fact that almost all the students who make it to Caltech, one of the best scientific universities in the world, come from public schools, not from private schools that sometimes nurture a sense that just because you are there, you are special and entitled. “I look at the kids who come to Caltech, and they grew up in families that encouraged them to work hard and to put off a little bit of gratification for the future and to understand that they need to hone their skills to play an important role in the world,” Baltimore said. “I give parents enormous credit for this, because these kids are all coming from public schools that people are calling failures. Public education is producing these remarkable students-so it can be done. Their parents have nurtured them to make sure that they realize their potential. I think we need a revolution in this country when it comes to parenting around education.”
Clearly, foreign-born parents seem to be doing this better. “About one-third of our students have an Asian background or are recent immigrants,” he said. A significant majority of the students coming to Caltech in the engineering disciplines are foreign-born, and a large fraction of its current faculty is foreign-born. “In biology, at the postdoc level, the dominance of Chinese students is overwhelming,” said Baltimore. No wonder that at the big scientific conferences today, a majority of the research papers dealing with cutting-edge bioscience have at least one Chinese name on them.
My friends Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico have started several networking companies in Silicon Valley. At one time, Judy was chief technology officer for Cisco. I sat with them one afternoon and talked about this problem. “When I was eleven years old,” said Bill, “I knew I was going to be an engineer. I dare you to find an eleven-year-old in America who wants to be an engineer today. We've turned down the ambition level.”
Added Judy, “More of the problem [can be solved by good] parenting than can be solved from a regulatory or funding move. Everyone wants to fund more of this and that, but where it starts is with the parents. Ambition comes from the parents. People have to get it. It will probably take a crisis [to get us refocused].”
In July 2004, comedian Bill Cosby used an appearance at Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund's annual conference to upbraid African-Americans for not teaching their children proper grammar and for black kids not striving to learn more themselves. Cosby had already declared, “Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.” Referring to African-Americans who squandered their chances for a better life, Cosby told the Rainbow Coalition, “You've got to stop beating up your women because you can't find a job, because you didn't want to get an education and now you're [earning] minimum wage. You should have thought more of yourself when you were in high school, when you had an opportunity.”
When Cosby's remarks attracted a lot of criticism, Reverend Jackson defended him, arguing, “Bill is saying, let's fight the right fight. Let's level the playing field. Drunk people can't do that. Illiterate people can't do that.”