Education needs a revolution from outside

"To those who want to see real improvement in American education, I say: There will be no renaissance without a revolution." —George H. W. Bush, 1991

And you know what? He's right.

There is already a revolution taking place, but we are just spectators.

The World Wide Web created "globalization," and the global economic edge the United States once held is no longer a given. Yet our elected leaders keep trying to fix an outdated educational system created for a different era.

Asia is fast becoming the new center for information technology. Countries such as China, Singapore and Taiwan have increased their investment in education and the number of patents and scientific publications, and India is becoming a leader in the development of software.

At a time when information is critical to innovation, and science, math, and engineering are key, America graduates fewer students in those fields than other nations such as China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Today, our educational system is a patchwork of unrelated policies created and protected by special interest groups. Tomorrow, if we heard our national economy would be destroyed, the "stakeholders" would resist any change.

It's a new world and we better renew our educational system, beginning with K-12, before it's too late. It starts by answering two fundamental questions:

1. What should be the purpose of education in the 21st century?

2. What should be the role of government in education, if any?

If we don't answer them, we will keep debating how to fix education without first understanding what it is supposed to produce, and we will continue being spectators watching the United States become a Third World nation.

I believe there is a compelling state reason for government involvement: to teach the common values every society needs to hold it together, and to prepare its people with the skills needed to help themselves, and society, thrive in its environment — pretty basic stuff, but somehow we have managed to complicate it.

Government's role should be one where its leaders have an understanding of the current problems a society faces and provide solutions on how to solve them for the common good. It should be the catalyst that brings people together, calls upon them to lend their talent, and provides the support to make change as needed.