“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses”
who got the commandments from God, Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry.
“[China will] make extraordinary arrangements for urgently needed disciplines and majors… We will implement a national strategy for cultivating top talents.”
Huai Jinpeng, China’s minister of education.
In Louisiana, all classrooms must have a prominent poster of the Ten Commandments. In Florida, the war on very loosely defined “woke” allows individual parents to challenge classroom lessons, textbooks and what can be kept on school and public library bookshelves. This “war on woke” – generally anything that offends white evangelicals – is a plague that has infected red states like an intellectual COVID. “Alternative facts” and sanitized history and public events have replaced truth in so many red state classrooms, even reaching into college and university curricula. Once the paradigm of excellent public education, international high school standards among developed nations place the United States, based on objective test scores, somewhere between 19th and 38th depending on subject matter. Such “woke” battles have drained true educational resources.
With about 13,000 individual school districts, most with elected school boards, campaigns (particularly in red states) for candidates are often built on anti-woke promises, heavy priorities over academic accuracy and excellence. State lawsuits seeking equal access to public funding for religious schools are prevailing all the way up to the US Supreme Court. In many red states, teachers can lose their jobs, even face criminal prosecution, for stepping into “woke” subject areas (e.g., accurately depicting slavery and racial discrimination) with truth and facts. China is smiling, if not laughing, on this massively self-destructive American trend. Added to exponential college tuition increases and the concomitant student debt, the US educational system seems to have moved from merely shooting itself in the foot to moving that academic pistol for a head shot.
After enjoying technological supremacy during and after WWII, American arrogance and complacency were gut-punched as the Soviet Union was the first nation to launch an orbital satellite (Sputnik) in 1957. We had pride in our achievements, our schools and our prioritizing engineering achievements back then. With strong support from the Republican Eisenhower administration, education at all levels – public and private – became a national obsessive priority. Federal money poured into the education sector, and all hands were determined to restore American educational glory. What “made America great” then was our full-court press to make our schools competitive, excellent and based on full accuracy. National priorities and security were at stake, not to be tanked by individual parents or anti-woke-agenda school districts. Oddly, the educational priorities that were built by 1950s Republicans were being ripped to shred by 21st century Republicans.
28% of China’s economy is generated from manufacturing as compared to 11% for the US. We’re focused on “value building” primarily from financial structures and for-major-profit financial institutions. Much of China’s underlying engineering technology, the basis of their manufacturing strength, was born in the US. Where we do “make things,” they are often society-challenging social media platforms and related software. In the rising world of artificial intelligence, China is outspending us and generating more patents than we do. Their new prioritization of EVs has pushed their related technology into a cost-efficiency battle with which we cannot (or choose not to) compete, particularly in battery engineering. With an abundance of component-necessary rare earths, they are accelerating fast. Our response? High tariffs on such Chinese manufactures. US consumers pick up the costs with no genuine benefit to them.
Keith Bradsher, writing for the August 9th New York Times, tells us about how China is focused on rebuilding her economy by accelerating and reprioritizing public education: “Beijing’s challenge to the technological leadership that the United States has held since World War II is evidenced in China’s classrooms and corporate budgets, as well as in directives from the highest levels of the Communist Party.
“A considerably larger share of Chinese students major in science, math and engineering than students in other big countries do. That share is rising further, even as overall higher education enrollment has increased more than tenfold since 2000… Spending on research and development has surged, tripling in the past decade and moving China into second place after the United States. Researchers in China lead the world in publishing widely cited papers in 52 of 64 critical technologies, recent calculations by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveal…
“By comparison, only a fifth of American undergraduates and half of doctoral students are in these [STEM] categories, although American data defines these majors a little more narrowly… China’s manufacturing prowess has become a geopolitical issue, however. The government subsidies and policies that have helped fuel the factory boom have left many other countries wary of buying more of China’s exports.
“The European Union has imposed formidable provisional tariffs on electric vehicles from China. In the United States, which has also used tariffs to effectively block China’s E.V. companies, political and commercial pressure has impeded ventures with Chinese battery makers… ‘What happens when China passes the U.S. in R&D and they have [a vastly bigger] manufacturing base?’ asked Craig Allen, the president of the U.S.-China Business Council, which represents American companies doing business in China.” Anti-woke school boards will never ask or answer that question.
I’m Peter Dekom, and our “anti-woke-driven” anti-educational, anti-trained professional plague is beginning to take a huge toll contributing to a serious threat to our competitive and economic future.
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