That is right. Americans are the ones who increasingly need to level the playing field-not by pulling others down, not by feeling sorry for ourselves, but by lifting ourselves up. But when it comes to how to do that, Cosby was saying something that is important for black and white Americans, rich and poor. Education, whether it comes from parents or schools, has to be about more than just cognitive skills. It also has to include character building. The fact is, parents and schools and cultures can and do shape people. The most important influence in my life, outside of my family, was my high school journalism teacher, Hattie M. Steinberg. She pounded the fundamentals of journalism into her students-not simply how to write a lead or accurately transcribe a quote but, more important, how to comport yourself in a professional way. She was nearing sixty at the time I had her as my teacher and high school newspaper adviser in the late 1960s. She was the polar opposite of “cool,” but we hung around her classroom like it was the malt shop and she was Wolfman Jack. None of us could have articulated it then, but it was because we enjoyed being harangued by her, disciplined by her, and taught by her. She was a woman of clarity and principles in an age of uncertainty. I sit up straight just thinking about her! Our children will increasingly be competing head-to-head with Chinese, Indian, and Asian kids, whose parents have a lot more of Hattie's character-building approach than their own American parents. I am not suggesting that we militarize education, but I am suggesting that we do more to push our young people to go beyond their comfort zones, to do things right, and to be ready to suffer some short-run pain for longer gain.
I fear, though, that things will have to get worse before they get better. As Judy Estrin said, it will probably take a crisis. I would simply add: The crisis is already here. It is just playing out in slow motion. The flattening of the world is moving ahead apace, and barring war or some catastrophic terrorist event, nothing is going to stop it. But what can happen is a decline in our standard of living, if more Americans are not empowered and educated to participate in a world where all the knowledge centers are being connected. We have within our society all the ingredients for American individuals to thrive in this world, but if we squander those ingredients, we will stagnate.
I repeat: This is not a test. This is a crisis, and as Paul Romer has so perceptively warned, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
Developing Countries and the Flat World
NINE: The Virgin of Guadalupe
The more I worked on this book, the more I found myself asking people I met around the world where they were when they first discovered that the world was flat.
In the space of two weeks, I got two revealing answers, one from Mexico, one from Egypt. I was in Mexico City in the spring of 2004, and I put the question on the table during lunch with a few Mexican journalist colleagues. One of them said he realized that he was living in a new world when he started seeing reports appearing in the Mexican media and on the Internet that some statuettes of Mexico's patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, were being imported into Mexico from China, probably via ports in California. When you are Mexico and your claim to fame is that you are a low-wage manufacturing country, and some of your people are importing statuettes of your own patron saint from China, because China can make them and ship them all the way across the Pacific more cheaply than you can produce them, you are living in a flat world.